Nine of the ten largest wildfires in California history have occurred over the past decade, and five of those took place in 2020 alone.
The threat of wildfire is rising because climate change has made California hotter and drier, with more frequent extreme weather events such as drought, heat waves, and strong winds. Meanwhile, California’s wildlands are laden with fuel from millions of trees killed by drought and insects—perfect conditions for catastrophic wildfires.
To address this risk, Californians must come together to create better wildfire models and adopt a comprehensive, science-based approach to mitigating wildfire risk.
If we commit to using this technology, California can address the many critical issues surrounding wildfire, including evacuation decisions, firefighting tactics, power grid resilience, wildland management, and insurance availability.
Success depends on effective modeling of wildfire behavior and risk.
Unfortunately, the models currently used to forecast wildfires have not kept up with today’s conditions. These models, developed decades ago, assume that wildfires spread as a thin line of fire along the forest floor, consuming a light layer of needles and twigs—the type of fire, in other words, that evolved as a natural part of California’s ecosystems.
But because of climate change, today’s fires burn hotter, spread more quickly, and grow larger, behaving in ways the old models aren’t equipped to handle.