Fueled by powerful Santa Ana winds that bring hot, dry air from the deserts of the Great Basin, dangerous and fast-moving wildfires have now scorched tens of thousands of acres of land in Southern California, destroying entire neighborhoods and leaving scores of people homeless.
The death toll has risen to at least 28, with the number of fatalities expected to rise.
While firefighters hope to gain an upper hand in containing the firestorm, the conflagrations will not be the last. As the world warms, bone-dry vegetation, drought, and other undeniable signs of climate change will worsen and lengthen wildfires not only in California but also in other parts of the western United States, research has shown.
Will the public and private sectors have the information needed to better prepare for and mitigate the impacts?
A federal grant recently awarded to the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science aims to provide communities with the long-term weather and climate projections they need to manage such crises.
"This is an initiative I like to describe as the coproduction of science," said Ben Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School and the principal investigator of the project, noting that collaboration between researchers and policymakers is at the heart of the endeavor.
Awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office, the four-year $2.8 million grant has become even more vital given the massive wildfires that have destroyed homes and livelihoods in the Los Angeles area, according to Kirtman.
"Community stakeholders depend on information to make important decisions, whether it concerns infrastructure or energy systems," he said. "But it's a process that's fallen short. In many instances, they're trying to gather information as best they can from graphical data from reports such as those generated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that's not what they need. What they need is a group of scientists working with them to produce exactly the information they need to drive decisions."
Such decisions, Kirtman said, could have consequences for the next 20 years. "So we need to get the right information in their hands," he explained. "Is drought going to continuously persist? Will El Niño weather conditions produce record rainfalls and spawn the tremendous growth in grasses and shrubs that Southern California experienced last year, followed by the La Niña weather pattern that led to the dry, arid conditions that created the perfect storm for those firestorms? Policymakers need that detailed quantitative information, not pictures."
Kirtman noted, for example, that his team will work with the U.S. Forest Service on detailed analysis of the hot-dry-windy index that is used to predict weather conditions that can affect the spread of wildfires.
"What they'll want from us is to know the large-scale climate drivers that are determining whether there's going to be a massive, hot-dry-windy index at a particular location," said Kirtman, the William R. Middelthon III Endowed Chair of Earth Sciences who also directs the University's NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS). "And they want to know that information on timescales of days, weeks, months, and even years."
As part of the grant, Kirtman is leading a team that includes scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Colorado State University, and Florida International University. Wildfire risk is just one of the climate-related conditions they will address. The group will also focus on heat waves, coastal flood risks, extreme wind events, and western water resources, with the goal of supporting the adaptation and resilience efforts of local governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals.
Kirtman is renowned for his research that focuses on climate predictability from days to decades. His Subseasonal Experiment, or SubX, combines multiple global models from sources such as NOAA and NASA to forecast weather conditions three to four weeks ahead.
That model has performed remarkably well, accurately predicting such harsh weather events as the severe cold wave that hit the midwestern United States and eastern Canada in early 2019 and the Fourth of July heat wave that enveloped Alaska later that same year.
Meanwhile, his North American Multi-Model Ensemble project is a seasonal forecasting system that uses multiple climate models from North American centers to improve predictions of intraseasonal to interannual climate conditions.
The scientists who are part of the NOAA-funded project he is now leading—Developing Decadal Climate Projection Services Through Stakeholder Guidance and Foundational Science—will assemble this February, meeting with local officials from Miami-Dade and Broward counties at the Rosenstiel School for a day of roundtable discussions. "It's all part of the process of establishing trust, making stakeholders a part of the process that goes into climate science," Kirtman said.
With collaboration between scientists and decision-makers being one of the cornerstones of the project, "we'll be able to develop information that's both scientifically rigorous and immediately relevant to the public," said project coleader Emily Becker, a research associate professor at the Rosenstiel School and associate director of CIMAS. She added that she is looking forward to applying her expertise in studying how weather events vary on yearly or longer timescales to the project.
"We have spent decades understanding the basic science of how climate varies," said project coleader Amy Clement, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School who studies the causes of climate change on all timescales. "This project is a big leap forward in translating that understanding for people in meaningful and scientifically sound ways. That includes both what we do and do not—or cannot—know about regional climate changes and its future impacts."
