A new study tied the rise of wildfires in the western United States to increasingly warming temperatures.
Researchers at the University of Wyoming (UW) published the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that even an increase in average temperature as small as 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit could heighten the chance of a wildfire in high altitudes exponentially, Climate Central reported.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the research pointed to a three-degree-Fahrenheit rise in average temperature in Alaska over the last 50 years that coincided with wildfires growing in frequency and intensity.
"This project demonstrates the significance of historical records in addressing current issues," Thomas Baerwald, the NSF's program director for Geography and Spatial Sciences, said in a press release. "Scientists are working to understand the complex interactions among climate, vegetation, land use, fire and other factors. The insights gained from such relationships in the past can provide new insights for understanding these processes today."
In particular danger of increasing odds of wildfires are mountain ranges like the Rockies.
"When we look into the past for evidence of these large wildfires we only see them one time when temperatures rose about 1°F," study lead author John Calder, a UW Ph.D. candidate, told Climate Central. "Our study then adds more evidence that the recent increase in large wildfires is related to climate change because the only time we see these types of large wildfires in the last 2,000 years is when we had a similar amount of warming.
"We don't know how the other mountain ranges burned in the region, but expanding this study into other mountain ranges is something I would like to do."
