Future Fire Free Association II
Tricking myself into reading and writing about work
I’m totally going to keep up this pace of looking at papers and recording my incoherent thoughts as the paper dislodges them from my brain.
Galizia et al. 2023 Global warming reshapes European pyroregions
This paper comes from some leading researchers in Spain and France. I recently applied for a Churchill Fellowship to travel around southern and western Europe and talk to fire researchers, fire managers and policy makers about how they model wildfire risk and how they communicate it. Great project idea, don’t you think? The panel almost agreed - I made it to a second interview but missed out. I might go for it again next year. The authors of this paper would be on my shortlist of academics to visit, if I ever get there.
The paper is published in Earth’s Future, which is one of the more creatively named journals that has appeared amidst the deluge in recent years. It is published by the American Geophysical Union, which to me lends it an air of credibility, compared to plain vanilla publishers.
Just on that deluge, thank you to Steve Pyne for pointing out that the feeling of drowning under an exponentially growing pile of science is not new and was first documented by Derek J De Solla Price in his Little Science, Big Science talks and associated writings. I found a compilation published in 1986 at the library here at uni, although much of the work dates from the 1960s. There is a lot in the book, so let me start with a quote
“…using any reasonable definition of a scientist [Ed. apparently being a woman was not reasonable back then], we can say that 80 to 90 percent of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive now. Alternatively, any young scientist, starting now and looking back at the end of his career upon a normal life span, will find that 80 to 90 percent of all scientific work achieved by the end of the period will have taken place before his very eyes, and that only 10 to 20 percent will antedate his experience.
My snarky comment aside, the book essentially heralded the discipline of bibliometrics (and made me curious what those bilbiometricians are up to these days). De Solla Price also contributes ideas about what happens when exponential growth stops, as it must, and appears to have coined the term “Invisible College”, to refer to the collection of practising scientists in a discipline who work, travel, write and talk together.
The chapter/speech on Invisible Colleges includes this fantastic quote
One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world.
The quote is from the “rambunctious” Barnaby Rich in 1613, fifty years before the birth of the scientific journal.
Oops let’s get back to Galizia et al. They look at potential climate change effects on fire regimes in Europe. They define five flavours (pyroregions) and find that not only are increases in fire activity expected, but that the regions could expand. The most fire prone of these is predicted to grow in area by 50% under two degrees of warming and by 130% under four degrees of warming.
Data sources:
GlobFire, a daily fire dataset based on a MODIS burned area satellite product. It has 500m spatial resolution and runs from 2001-2018.
A daily fire radiative power dataset, also based on MODIS. This is a measure of a fire’s radiant energy and, as the authors point out, is frequently used as a proxy for fire intensity, carbon emissions and smoke impacts on human health.
Fire weather was represented by the Canadian Fire Weather Index, based on the ERA5 reanalysis product
For projections they used one regional climate model and six global climate models, applying bias corrections before proceeding.
They used the Corine land cover data from Copernicus (the same service which provided the reanalysis data), which gives a snapshot of what is on the ground at 100m spatial resolution.
They computed six fire regime components: burned area, number of fires, percentage of large fires (large is defined as over 100 hectares), percentage of fires in the cool season (defined as being between November and April), the length of fire period (presumably the time between first and last fire of the season) and fire intensity.
Researchers are always making decisions about what counts as big or small, hot or cold. There’s a good chance they tried different thresholds for large fires and cool season, to see if their results were sensitive to the definition.
The fire regimes they defined were: Cool season fires, Low fire-prone, Fire-prone, Highly fire-prone and Extremely fire-prone.
There is a lot more in the paper and I encourage readers to check it out. I’d love to try something similar for Australian fire regimes, perhaps focusing on the south-east of the country. Not the most novel idea, but I’m more than happy to borrow good ideas when I find them. Conversely, I’m always delighted when I propose something novel and then find someone else has taken the idea and turned into something much better. I harbor no delusions of being the Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin of fire science.