wildfires

UCI’s Tirtha Banerjee probes the physics behind catastrophic blazes

To help improve fire prevention policies, Salvador Zarate, UCI assistant professor of anthropology, will use a $12,000 faculty fellowship from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to document the practices of Orange County weed abatement crews. “We experienced our worst fire season ever this year, and we can tap into the deep ecological […]

A University of California, Irvine-led team has received $3.6 million over three years for a project that uses science and engineering to help California fight wildfires. The funding comes from the University of California Laboratory Fees Research Program competition, a contest designed to promote the development of multicampus projects and collaborations that advance the missions […]

UCI-created AI tool for predicting blaze size proves successful in Alaska; team now focuses on California

New technique could help authorities conduct triage in multiple-blaze scenarios

To make better predictions about future wildfires around the world, climate scientists want to know the prevalence and intensity of past outbreaks. For a study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Melinda Nicewonger, a UCI graduate student in Earth system science, examined ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to measure changes […]

Temperature increases during dry periods outpace average climate warming

Extreme lightning storms are the main driver of recent massive fire years in Alaska and Canada, and these storms are likely to move farther north with climate warming, potentially altering landscapes, according to findings in Nature Climate Change by researchers from UCI, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and elsewhere. Analyzing satellite images and data from ground-based networks, […]

UCI, other researchers examine differences between summer, Santa Ana fires

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA have uncovered a remarkably strong link between high wildfire risk in the Amazon basin and the devastating hurricanes that ravage North Atlantic shorelines. The climate scientists’ findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters near the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s calamitous August 2005 landfall at New Orleans.