Apr 22 2015

What is the moisture content of standing dead grass?

Blackline WR4-TXrange2007-crop

April 2007 burning standing dead grass on Texas Range near Delta using a terra-torch (BLM-AFS).

Eric Miller, BLM Alaska Fire Service Fire Ecologist, assists with a lot of prescribed burns on military training ranges in Alaska where the primary fuel is standing dead grass (photo) and this question was often on his mind. He found that existing fine dead fuel moisture tables underestimated the moisture content in dead grass. Six years and 74 prescribed burn days later he had collected 409 grass samples and 285 weather observations, enough to build several empirical- and process-based fuel moisture models. He gave a presentation on his findings at the Alaska Fire Science workshop in April 2015 and prepared a 1-page research brief on the highlights of his study.

Eric introduced a simple “Rule of Thumb” for predicting dead grass moisture content in the field:  MC = rH/5 + 4   You can find the new fuel moisture and ignition probability calculators based on Eric’s field campaign, along with other useful tools like a dead grass fuel loading photoseries and CFFDRS calculator, on his website:   http://www.taigafire.org/

EAM-RB-2015

Mar 30 2015

AFSC workshop and open house on Wednesday, April 1

2151fe7930311233d3077020db3780aa_f39292015 Spring Alaska Fire Science Workshop

Wed, April 1
Wedgewood Resort Garden RoomOpen House 9:30 am – 1:00 pm

Presentations 1:00 – 5:00 pm
This is a busy week for fire managers, with IMT, FMO, AA meetings, plus M581 training and the dispatch workshop! Stop by our Open House Wednesday morning for a quick cup of coffee and tell AFSC about your science needs, check out a poster, or grab a new research brief. We’ll have presentations on research relevant to your work starting at 1 pm Wednesday afternoon, including Devon Barnes sharing his results on sprinkler use for structure protection. Join us for as much or as little time as you can spare!
 
Link to Workshop event page. Contact Alison York for more information.
Mar 20 2015

Ides of March–tidings of an early start to 2015 fire season

Capture-rickLate last year, Rick Thoman, NWS Climate Scientist in Fairbanks, predicted a warm winter for most of Alaska at his December 2014 NWS Webinar.  That forecast worked out pretty well, with Dec-Jan-Feb temperatures well above normal for that period all over the state! So what does he say now about the upcoming spring and start of Alaska fire season? At a March 19 forecast briefing for fire managers, Rick pointed out benefits of the newer “dynamic” climate models which continuously update their algorithms with the latest weather observations.  This kind of modeling requires major computing power so it’s only become

View Rick’s recorded monthly climate webinars posted on ACCAP’s website: https://accap.uaf.edu/?q=NWS_Briefings

possible in the last decade or so with availability of supercomputing centers.  The collection of multi-model ensembles he showed universally point to a warm or VERY WARM April (goodbye snow pack!) and that seems to extend out to the April-May-June outlook as well, with pretty good confidence.  One moderating influence in the forecast comes from mid-range precipitation outlooks from two independent forecast tools which call for above-normal precipitation, especially in the eastern Interior.  The missing link that fire managers would like to be able to forecast is convection (lightning), but Rick says that may be coming as climate modelers gain experience with the new dynamic models.  AICC Predictive Services has now posted their seasonal outlook for the 2015 Fire Season on the web, where you can learn about Modoki El Niño and what that may mean for fire season!Capture-cpc

 

Mar 13 2015

Where fire management and carbon studies connect . . .

Screen capture of the WFEIS calculator (http://wfeis.mtri.org)

On the surface Alaska fire management and boreal ecosystem carbon studies have little in common.  But a deeper look reveals the connections between them.  Carbon scientists in the last decade have become increasingly interested in fire effects on the legacy carbon locked up in permafrost and the deep, slow-to-decompose organic layer of boreal forest floor (Kasischke et al. 2013, Genet et al. 2013).  Projections indicating more extensive, frequent and/or severe fires in northern latitudes with a rapidly warming climate, longer fire seasons, and more lightning (Romps, et al. 2014) lend a certain urgency to attempts to quantify the potential impacts of fire-released carbon on greenhouse warming.  Fire management agencies are less interested in long-term impacts of fire-released gasses but they are more and more driven to assess impacts of smoke on communities.  Work at the boundary between the two sets of interests has started to yield some interesting results.  For example, Michigan Tech Research Institute has joined their consumption field data from NASA studies to the USFS Consume Model and FCCS fuels maps and LANDFIRE fire perimeters in a web-based tool that provides users a simple interface for computing wildland fire emissions (1-km spatial resolution). The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) can calculate tons of CO2 or other gases from large fires across the US and Canada from 1984-2010.  Although this tool is  for post-facto emissions analysis it is a good example of how large spatial data sets and complex equations can be united in a simple graphical interface allowing one to–say–query the forest fire emissions from the 231,000 acres burned in Alaska in 2010 (10.9 million tons CO2, 95,000 tons PM 2.5).  The hope is that weather modeling and research linkages with the common fire danger and risk rating system used in northern latitudes (CFFDRS) will soon bring this kind of application into the real-time and forecast prediction realm.

Feb 17 2015

Does climate warming mean more lightning in Alaska?

Capture-trendgraph-lightning-2012JDisMgmt

Fig. 1. Yearly and monthly number of lightning flashes in Alaska from 1986-2010 (Farukh and Hayasaka, 2012)

A recent article in Science magazine (Romps, et al. 2014) postulated a 12% increase in lightning strikes over the continental US for each degree C of warming.  If this model holds true for Alaska, we should have already seen an increase in lightning strikes of roughly 20% in interior Alaska over the last 25 years since summer temperature has warmed by about 2.5 F–up to 3.7 F north of the Brooks Range (data from UAF Geophysical Institute).  So, has anyone looked at the trends in Alaska’s Automatic Lightning Detection Data to see what has been observed?  AFS has been collecting this data (publicly available at http://fire.ak.blm.gov) since 1986. It turns out the answer is yes!  Drs.Farukh and Hayasaka (2012) published an article on how large lightning storms characterized some of our largest recent fire seasons including this figure.  I’d like to challenge other  investigators to look at the regional significance of this phenomenon in the state, which could be an important fire regime driver in boreal forest/tundra, with the data which is now complete (ALDS went offline in 2013, replaced by a time-of-arrival system)!

Jan 27 2015

Climate Change and Fire May Impact Northern Alaska Caribou Herds

Boundary Fire near the Canadian border 2005 (Photo: Tony Chapman, BLM Alaska Fire Service)

Will climate-driven changes in fire regime affect the Porcupine Caribou Herd? Caribou actively seek out and rely on high-energy lichen-rich habitats in the winter, and these lichen stands–also known as “caribou moss”– are uniquely sensitive to fire, requiring 60-100 years to recover after burning. Alaska climate modelers and biologists teamed up to study predicted annual acreage burned in the ranges of two northern herds: the Central Arctic Herd and the Porcupine Caribou Herd (of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge fame). Using newly developed models of wildfire response to climate changes, Gustine et al. (2014) modeled burn acreage in the next few decades under two possible climate trajectories: let’s call them “warm” or “hot”. Under the “warm” scenario they found little change through 2090 in the total old-growth habitats available to caribou of either herd. However, the “hot” climate scenario indicated fires grew larger, increasing average area of winter habitat that burned per decade. In brief, the Central Arctic Herd lost 11% of their winter habitat and the Porcupine Herd lost 21% through 2090 under the “hot” scenario. In addition, 30% of the Porcupine Herd’s current spruce forest habitat changed to a younger forest type or tundra. While biologists continue to debate how much habitat is required to sustain herds at present levels, habitat loss is rarely beneficial and availability of old-growth lichen stands is a big driver of caribou use patterns in most Alaska herds. If we humans have the power to rein in the pace of climate change to the “warm” scenario by slowing our greenhouse gas emissions, the caribou would probably appreciate it. This short illustrated paper is open access—read the whole research article at:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0100588

Citation: Gustine, D.D., Brinkman, T., Lindgren, M., Schmidt, J.I., Rupp, T.S., and Adams, L.G., 2014, Climate-driven effects of fire on winter habitat for caribou in the Alaskan-Yukon Arctic: PLOS One, v. 9, no. 7 100588, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100588

Jan 13 2015

REDapp webinar Wed, Jan 28

Canadian REDapp Fire Behavior Calculator:  A new tool for Alaska & Great Lakes fire management agencies?

Neal McLoughlin, Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, REDapp Development Lead, Edmonton, AlbertaFeatured image

Wed, January 28, 2015
11:00 am AKST

Recorded webinar available here: https://vimeo.com/118842504

REDapp is a universal fire behavior calculator developed with financial support from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), and in-kind support from fire management agencies across Canada. This application is currently in a beta stage of development. A public release is expected in early 2015. Unlike WFFDS, Behave, FSPro and other more rigorous fire behavior modeling programs, REDapp is intended to provide basic fire behavior projections with minimal training. Managers introduced to REDapp at a fall workshop in Fairbanks felt the tool could be used by field operatives, dispatchers, managers, and other agency cooperators to link numerical outputs of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) with potential fire behavior and spread. Neal McLoughlin from Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development will deliver an web-based demonstration of how to use REDapp. Test locations and weather data from the US will be used during the demonstration.
If you would like to try out REDapp (currently in invitation only beta), please email AFSC coordinator Alison York  for access.

Dec 19 2014

What is the Weather Outlook for Early Season 2015?

Rick Thoman, NWS Climate Scientist in Fairbanks, said “Save this one!” when he showed this slide about the CPC’s spring temperature prediction in his Dec. 19 NWS Webinar.  So I did:  it’s a pretty bold forecast for a warmer than normal early spring in much of Alaska.  Of course, it’s still hard to know what that might mean for fire season.  We know that warmer springs can be associated with premature disappearance of snow and higher fire danger in that pre-greenup season though.  On the other hand, well-timed spring rain, after the ground thaws enough to receive it, can just as easily put a damper on duff fuel moistures well into the summer.  And, it’s a lot easier to predict temperature than precipitation.  Still, when I hear the starting line-up:  PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) in a warm phase, a fairly robust El Niño, and warm early spring–I can’t help but think that it could be an interesting year.  It looks like Southcentral Alaska may be in the cross-hairs again too.  Check out the latest seasonal outlooks as the season progresses at CPC’s website.

December 18th NWS prediction for spring temperature/precip in Alaska. See the latest at www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/90day/

December 18th Climate Prediction Center Forecast for spring temperature/precip in Alaska. See the latest at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/90day/

Dec 10 2014

ABoVE solicitation released

Preview of “Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)” copyNASA has released the first Research Announcement for the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) field campaign. NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program plans to support this major field campaign in Alaska and western Canada during the next 5 to 8 years.

ABoVE will seek a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems and society to climate change. Map shows the domain of interest. Wildland fire is a key disturbance agent in the science plan. Letters of intent due Jan 20. More details at http://above.nasa.gov/index.html?

Nov 24 2014

Webinar on Dec 4: Adventures with IFTDSS on the Kenai Peninsula

Join us for the first webinar of the season!

Shaded_Narrow_FlameLengthChange_Treated1.JPG
Lisa Saperstein, Regional Fire Ecologist
US Fish and Wildlife Service – Alaska Region

Thursday, December 4, 2014
10:00 am AKST

Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3446718627144957698

This webinar explores a current effort to use the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) in Alaska for fuel treatment planning on or adjacent to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. In addition, IFTDSS was also used to assess the effectiveness of pre-existing fuelbreaks during the 2014 Funny River Fire as well as providing insight on how IFTDSS can inform the design of future fuel treatments.

Caption: Modeled post-treatment changes in flame length within a fuelbreak. Green pixels indicate an estimated reduction of 6 – 32 feet. Figure courtesy Lisa Saperstein.