Interdisciplinary 

This project is a collaboration with the Moritz fire ecology group at UC Berkeley.  

Fire plays a crucial role in many ecosystems, and a better understanding of different controls on fire activity is needed. Here we analyze spatial variation in fire danger during episodic wind events (or Santa Ana events) in coastal southern California, a densely populated Mediterranean‐climate region.  We identified Santa Ana events in our recent 6-km resolution Southern California climate simulations, and provided the simulated meteorological information associated with those events to the Berkeley group.  They then used this data and a fire behavior model to produce the first high‐resolution map of the fire risk associated with Santa Anas.  The map is shown below.  The team also analyzed over half a century of mapped fire history in chaparral ecosystems of the region, finding that coupled climate/fire behavior models successfully predict where the largest wildfires are most likely to occur.   There is a surprising lack of information about extreme fire weather patterns worldwide, and this type of quantitative analyses of their spatial variation will be important for effective fire management and sustainable long‐term urban development on fire‐prone landscapes.

At UCLA, Mimi Hughes and Alex Hall make up the team that performed this research.