Smoke plume from 2015 Card Street fire (Alaska Division of Forestry).

A collaboration between NOAA, UAF, UAA, NWS, AFSC and AICC Predictive Services has produced a new paper on attribution of extreme fire seasons to climate change. The report appears in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), “An Assessment of the Role of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the Alaska Fire Season of 2015,” announced at AGU last week.

Bottom line: Human-induced climate change may have increased the risk of a fire season of 2015 severity by 34%–60%.  (LINK:  Chapter 4 in  https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/explaining-extreme-events-from-a-climate-perspective/)