Firefighters watch a Bobcat fire erupt in Juniper Hills, California in 2020. (Credit: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock)
The Thomas Fire, one of the largest wildfires in California’s history, was a harbinger of what was to come. In December 2017, a month usually outside of the wildfire season, the fires, caused by power lines, consumed approximately 281,800 acres.
“The new normal has arrived,” said Michael Gorner, director of the Berkeley Fire Laboratory.
He cites climate change, inadequate fire management and a tendency for people to migrate to wilderness areas as contributing factors. The result was a new age of monstrous phenomena known as megafires, which burned more than 100,000 acres and tragically killed dozens of people.
A camp fire in November 2018 killed 85 people and burned nearly 153,000 acres.
read more: How the National Park Service is Working to Prevent Wildfires
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Other researchers, including Gorner and Craig Clements of the San Jose State University Fire and Meteorology Institute, are working to give firefighters and California communities an edge.
“We are developing new tools. We have new observations that we need to incorporate into fire management,” says Clements.
Clement’s lab is working on fire scanning and mapping techniques using light detection and ranging (LIDAR) devices that can peer into smoke columns and identify strong updrafts. Together with data from weather balloons, it helps predict how fires will change and where they will go.
This video first appeared magazines you know, an independent journalism effort from Annual Reviews.you can view the original here.
