WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Using NASA satellite data and climate models, scientists have projected drier conditions will likely cause increased fire activity across the United States in coming decades. The finding was presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
"Climate models project an increase in fire risk across the U.S. by 2050, based on a trend toward drier conditions that favor fire activity and an increase in the frequency of extreme events," Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said while presenting the finding.
The analysis by Morton and colleagues used climate projections, prepared for the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to examine how dryness, and therefore fire activity, is expected to change.
The researchers calculated results for low and high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. In both cases, results suggest more fire seasons that are longer and stronger across all regions of the U.S. in the next 30-50 years. Specifically, high fire years like 2012 would likely occur two to four times per decade by mid-century, instead of once per decade under current climate conditions.
Through August of this year, the U.S. burned area topped 2.5 million hectares (6.17 million acres). That is short of the record 3.2 million hectares (7.90 million acres) burned in 2011, but exceeds the area burned during 12 of the 15 years since record keeping began in 1997.
As the U.S. land area burned by fire each year has increased significantly in the past 25 years, so too have the emissions. The researchers found that carbon emissions from fires have grown from an average of eight teragrams (8.8 million tons) per year from 1984 to 1995 to an average of 20 teragrams (22 million tons) per year from 1996 to 2008.
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