Fingerprint of Anthropogenic Climate Change Detected in Long-Term Western North American Fire Weather Trends

Alarming overlap in fires in Australia, North America revealed

Climate change is lengthening fire seasons across much of the world. This means the potential for wildfires at any time of the year, in both hemispheres, is increasing. That poses a problem. Australia regularly shares firefighting resources with the United States and Canada. But these agreements rest on the principle that when North America needs these personnel and aircraft, Australia doesn’t, and vice versa. Climate change means this assumptio…

Fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change detected in long-term western North American fire weather trends

The anthropogenic fingerprint has been detectable in observed global climate change for decades, yet it is still difficult to detect at the regional scale beyond temperature due to the presence of large internal variability and modeling and observational uncertainties. Here we demonstrate regional optimal fingerprinting of long-term fire weather trends in western North America, leveraging large ensembles of high resolution, atmosphere-only clima…