Story at a glance
- New research shows fires in the U.S. have grown larger and increasingly frequent over the past two decades.
- A team led by researchers from the University of Colorado analyzed more than 28,000 fires between 1984 and 2018 from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity.
- They found there were more fires across all regions of the contiguous U.S. from 2005 to 2018 when compared to the previous two decades.
New research shows fires in the U.S. have grown larger and increasingly frequent over the past two decades as scientists express concerns that climate change is leading to more extreme occurrences.
A team led by researchers from the University of Colorado analyzed more than 28,000 fires between 1984 and 2018 from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) dataset and found there were more fires across all regions of the contiguous U.S. from 2005 to 2018 when compared to the previous two decades.
“Projected changes in climate, fuel and ignitions suggest that we’ll see more and larger fires in the future. Our analyses show that those changes are already happening,” Virginia Iglesias, a research scientist with CU Boulder’s Earth Lab and lead author of the paper, said in a news release.
Researchers noted that fire frequency doubled during that period in the West and East, while quadrupling in the Great Plains region. The amount of land burned each year increased from a median of 1,552 to 5,502 square miles in the West and from 465 to 1,295 square miles in the Great Plains, they added.
The team discovered during the 2000s, the largest fires in the West and Great Plains grew larger and increased in frequency, and larger fires were more likely to occur around the time of other large fires.
“More and larger co-occurring fires are already altering vegetation composition and structure, snowpack, and water supply to our communities,” Iglesias said. “This trend is challenging fire-suppression efforts and threatening the lives, health, and homes of millions of Americans.”
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The size of fires in all fire-prone regions across the contiguous U.S. increased in size during the 2000s, leading researchers to conclude that space between individual fires is shrinking, but fires are spreading into more areas of the country.
“These convergent trends, more large fires plus intensifying development, mean that the worst fire disasters are still to come,” William Travis, co-author and Earth Lab deputy director, said in the release.
The study was published Wednesday in Science Advances.
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