Author: Cunningham, Calum X.; Williamson, Grant J.; Bowman, David M. J. S.
Description: Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (>99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions-particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes-with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters.
Subject headings: Wildfires; Climate Change; Earth; Planet; Fires
Publication year: 2024
Journal or book title: Nature Ecology & Evolution
Volume: 8
Issue: 8
Pages: 1420-1425
Find the full text: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02452-2
Find more like this one (cited by): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3993993604021616033&as_sdt=1000005&sciodt=0,16&hl=en
Serial number: 3997
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