A few days ago I wondered if there would be a correlation between temperature anomalies and wildfires (number, intensity, or some other quantitative metric). It seems intuitive enough: warmer temperatures lead to drier conditions which lead to more fires. But how would one compare these two quantities in a meaningful way? Luckily for you, someone has already done just this problem, albeit just for the Southwestern United States.

Forest Wildfire Activity Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S.

Abstract: Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional changes in wildfire has been systematically documented. Much of the public and scientific discussion of changes in western United States wildfire has focused instead on the effects of 19thand 20th-century land-use history. We compiled a comprehensive database of large wildfires in western United States forests since 1970 and compared it with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.

I haven’t delved into this paper, but on a cursory examination it appears that my (and likely a lot of other peoples) simple hypotheses was correct: increasing temperatures lead to more wildfires.

Westerling, A.L. et al., Forest Wildfire Activity Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S., Science 313, 940 (2006). DOI: 10.1126/science.1128834

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