For almost two weeks, the High Park wildfire in Northern Colorado has captured American hearts, minds and headlines. In the first few days, dry temperatures and beetle-killed trees allowed the fire to spread across thousands of acres almost instantly.
Firefighters from Fort Collins, Colo., and beyond were brought in to help with the blaze, assisted by members of the Colorado National Guard who lent two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters for water drops over the area. Although it was feared that extremely dry conditions and driving winds could feed the fire into the autumn months, local authorities are now reporting at least 50 percent containment. Now comes the truly ugly part, when damage must be assessed. As of today, sources say the blaze destroyed nearly 92 square miles and at least 189 homes — the most in the state’s history.
As evacuation bans are lifted and folks in Fort Collins see blue sky where there has been only smoke and ash for almost two weeks, questions about how the wildfire started and why it got so bad so quickly have emerged. Last week, fire investigators confirmed lightning is to blame for igniting the blaze. But according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, climate change could make similar wildfires more common in the future.
The international team of researchers worked with an atmospheric scientist from Texas Tech University to combine over a decade of satellite-based fire records with historical climate observations and model simulations of future change. The authors documented gradients between fire-prone and fire-free areas of Earth, and quantified the environmental factors responsible for these patterns. They then used these relationships to simulate how future climate change would drive future fire activity through the coming century as projected by a range of global climate models.
“In the long run, we found what most fear — increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet,” said study lead author Max Moritz, fire specialist at UC Cooperative Extension. “But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising. These abrupt changes in fire patterns not only affect people’s livelihoods, but they add stress to native plants and animals that are already struggling to adapt to habitat loss.”
Evidence to support this prediction is happening all around us. Currently, 20 large wildfires were burning in eight Western states, from Idaho and Wyoming to California and Arizona, according to the U.S. Forest Service. A map of active fires is online at activefiremaps.fs.fed.us.
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