Ytterligare en studie visar sambandet mellan ökande skogsbränder och klimatförändringarna.
Luftfuktigheten tycks vara väldigt avgörande.
Mina fetningar i texten.
'Only the beginning': Increase in wildfires heavily linked to climate change, study finds
TORONTO -- A new study strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land destroyed by wildfires over the past two decades in the western U.S., and one researcher says the trend is likely to worsen in the years to come.
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The increasing destructiveness of wildfires is shown by U.S. Geological Survey data.
Between 1984 to 2000, the average burned area across 11 western states was nearly seven thousand square kilometres per year.
For the next 17 years, through 2018, the average burned area was approximately 13.5 thousand square kilometres per year.
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The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tackles the question of what has caused this massive increase in destruction, and whether it is indeed climate change or simply changing weather patterns.
The researchers applied artificial intelligence to climate and fire data in order to determine the impact of climate change, among other factors, on vapour pressure deficit (VPD), which is the key climate variable of wildfire risk.
VPD is the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and how much moisture the air can hold when saturated. When the VPD is higher than the present amount of moisture, the air can draw additional moisture from soil and plants. Large wildfire-burned areas tend to have high VPD levels.
The study found that the 68 per cent of the increase in VPD across the western U.S. between 1979 and 2020 was likely due to climate change.
The rest was likely caused by naturally occurring changes in weather patterns.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/only-the-beginning-increase-in-wildfires-heavily-linked-to-climate-change-study-finds-1.5655576
Studien:
Quantifying contributions of natural variability and anthropogenic forcings on increased fire weather risk over the western United States
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2111875118