If I had to place a bet on this being the worst fire season ever in California, or not, my chips are shifting in a not good direction. Drought monitor from today: 26% of the state is in exceptional drought. Up from 16% last week. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/data/jpg/20210525/20210525_ca_text.jpg …
-
...A big part of what makes certain fire seasons exceptionally severe (from lives lost, homes burned, & ecosystems damaged perspective) has substantial random component. Do ignitions primarily occur during extreme fire wx? Do we see many heatwaves/wind/dry lightning events? (2/3)
Is there a literal model linking preconditions to outcomes (complete with random factors)? Conclusions can be very different if we're talking about wf = pre + rand, or pre ** 2 + rand, or pre * rand, etc (to caricature)
-
-
Lots of folks have developed wildfire predictive models of different functional form. My main point here is that vegetation dryness is one of few aspects w/high degree of predictability months in advance, but it is a very influential factor & it's off the charts right now.
-
But this year is there not some anticorrelation between dryness and available fuel? Hence the concern would be focused more on heavily forested areas.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
The severity of a car crash has a large random component (based on everything that happens at that moment) but because it is a sigmoid function of speed (preconditions) there is a regime in which the preconditions dominate the severity
-
Broadly speaking, I think that's an apt analogy to the wildfire situation. High speed, generally, is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a severe car crash; the same is usually true of extreme vegetation dryness and very intense fires.
- Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.