Skip to content
A4 civilengineering
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Education
  • Community
  • Thought
  • Ongoing Happenings
  • Contact Us
Menu Close

Blog

  1. Home>
  2. Disaster>
  3. What’s Behind California’s Surge of Large Fires?
What’s Behind California’s Surge of Large Fires?
If it seems like enormous wildfires have been constantly raging in California in recent summers, it’s because they have. Eight of the state’s ten largest fires on record—and twelve of the top twenty—have happened within the past five years, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Together, those twelve fires have burned about 4 percent of California’s total area—a Connecticut-sized amount of land.

Two recent incidents—the Dixie fire (2021, above) and the August fire complex (2020)—stand out for their size. Each of these burned nearly 1 million acres—an area larger than Rhode Island—as they raged for months in forests in Northern California. Several other large fires, as well as many smaller ones in densely populated areas, have proven catastrophic in terms of structures destroyed and lives lost. Thirteen of California’s twenty most destructive wildfires have occurred in the past five years; they collectively destroyed 40,000 homes, businesses, and pieces of infrastructure.

The total area burned by fires each year and the average size of fires is up as well, according to Keith Weber, a remote sensing ecologist at Idaho State University and the principal investigator of the Historic Fires Database, a project of NASA’s Earth Science Applied Sciences program. The database shows that about 3 percent of the state’s land surfaces burned between 1970-1980; from 2010-2020 it was 11 percent. The shift toward larger fires is clear in the decadal maps (above) of fire perimeter data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

“The numbers are really worrisome, but they are not at all surprising to fire scientists,” said Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist based in Sequoia National Park. He is among several experts who say a confluence of factors has driven the surge of large, destructive fires in California: unusual drought and heat exacerbated by climate change, overgrown forests caused by decades of fire suppression, and rapid population growth along the edges of forests.
Read More
earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Read more articles

Previous PostNASA Smoke Signals for Air Quality
Next PostExplainable machine learning models of major crop traits from satellite-monitored continent-wide field trial data

You Might Also Like

Australian city uses artificial intelligence-powered sensors to promote sustainable travel

Australian city uses artificial intelligence-powered sensors to promote sustainable travel

October 1, 2021
Reducing Emissions and Avoiding Congestion: Kapsch TrafficCom Presents Innovative Solutions and Smart Urban Mobility at the ITS World Congress 2021

Reducing Emissions and Avoiding Congestion: Kapsch TrafficCom Presents Innovative Solutions and Smart Urban Mobility at the ITS World Congress 2021

October 19, 2021
Satellites View California Oil Spill

Satellites View California Oil Spill

October 16, 2021

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021

Categories

  • 3D Printing
  • Air Quality
  • Architecture
  • Automation
  • BIM
  • Civil Software
  • Computer Vision
  • Constrcution Site
  • Digital Twin
  • Disaster
  • Earthquake
  • Edu Resource
  • Environmental
  • FreeCourse
  • Geotechnical Engineering
  • GIS
  • Industry News
  • Intelligent Transportation System
  • IOT
  • Market Analysis
  • Project Management
  • Remote Sensing
  • Sensors
  • Smart City
  • Smart Home
  • Smart Home/Building
  • Smart Materials
  • Structural Engineering
  • Structural Health Monitoring
  • Transportation
  • Uncategorized
  • Urban Planning

Recent Posts

  • How DJ Baruah Engineers And Architects Built A Firm On Belief And Vision
  • Train more civil engineers to solve our infrastructure crisis
  • East Kilbride engineering firm in management buyout
  • S. African youths hail Chinese tech training
  • Cloud Based Big Data Solution for Cancer Classification: Using Databricks on Large Scale Genomic Data
A4 civilengineering
©2021 Privacy policy
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Education
  • Community
  • Thought
  • Ongoing Happenings
  • Contact Us

Enjoying the contents?

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter