Parsing the exact role a changing climate played in the historic burns can be challenging, especially in Western forests overstocked with woody kindling due to decades of fire suppression and a relatively hands-off forest management policy. But, experts agreed, there is clear evidence that a warmer, drier climate played a central role.
“We do see a climate change signal in the fire seasons we’re having,” said Jennifer Jones, a public affairs specialist with the Forest Service’s office of fire and aviation management. “It’s climate change, it’s hazardous fuel buildup, it’s nonnative species invasions, it’s insect infestations. Climate change is part of that, but in any given season, it’s impossible to know how much.”
More than 10.1 million acres of U.S. forests—private, state and federal—were scorched last year, marking 2015 as the most extensive and expensive fire season on record, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Forest Service. The agency was forced to “borrow” three times from non-firefighting funds to pay for fire suppression. The agency reported spending more than $2.6 billion, or 52 percent of its budget, on firefighting efforts in 2015 (Greenwire, Jan. 7).
A little more than half of those acres, 5.1 million, burned in Alaska. As it has for the past few years, fire season came early to the Last Frontier.
What little snow did fall melted away quickly when warmer-than-average temperatures hit the state in March and April, said Tim Mowry, public information officer for the Alaska Division of Forestry. A deluge of lightning strikes helped ignite hundreds of fires over the course of the dry summer months.
“Our fire seasons have been starting earlier and lasting longer, and we’ve tended to have bigger fire seasons and more acreages burned,” he said. A few years ago, the Division of Forestry moved up the beginning of fire season from May 1 to April 1 in acknowledgement of the longer fire season.