Smoke plume from the 2015 Card Street fire in Alaska (Photo: Alaska Division of Forestry)

In the aftermath of Alaska’s 2nd largest fire season in 2015, followed by a record-breaking warm winter & spring (again) people are wondering if climate warming may be partly to blame.  With Alaska warming twice as fast as the western US, it seems fire regime change is already upon us–and starting to receive national attention.  Three new fire science research proposals were just funded for the Alaska region to look help understand and plan for these changes:  The national Joint Fire Science Program funded “Implications for Operational Costs and Complexity under Future Scenarios“and “Alaskan Tundra Fires During a Time of Rapid Climate Change“.  Both proposals attempt to help fire managers cope with climate-induced changes in the boreal fire regime and address research priorities of the Alaska wildfire management community. A third proposal “Seasonal Climate Forecasting Applied to Wildland Fire Management in Alaska” was funded by NOAA to investigate the large-scale climate drivers of fire weather in Alaska with a focus on lightning, temperature, and precipitation and expand the forecasts and tools available to fire managers. It’s not just high latitudes feeling the heat–a recent piece by the New York Times interviewed fire managers and ecologists around the country for their take on changes: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/wildfires-season-global-warming.html  And if you want to see how another hot news item–  politics!!–might play into wildland fire, see this interesting new report by Joint Fire Science Program:  Scanning the Future of Wildfire: Resilience ahead whether we like it or not!