TUCSON, ARIZ. -- Fire management officials from key regions around the country and climate experts will meet at the University of Arizona Feb. 23 - 24 to discuss how best to plan for the upcoming wildfire season.
Current La Nina conditions already are producing dry winters in several regions, including the Southwest, said Barbara Morehouse of the UA Institute for the Study of Planet Earth (ISPE). She is program manager for ISPE's Climate Assessment Project for the Southwest (CLIMAS).
The Fire Management Workshop will be held at ISPE, 715 N. Park Ave. (2nd floor). CLIMAS, with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), ISPE and the UA Laboratory of Tree Ring Research are sponsoring the workshop.
Fire managers and climate experts are concerned that continued dry conditions, coupled in some areas with significant fuel load build-ups from prior wet years, will produce extreme fire conditions in the exceptionally dry forests of the Southeast and Southwest in the upcoming wildfire season. At the same time, current wet conditions in the Pacific Northwest suggest that fire hazard may be less extreme for this region, at least until later in the fire season.
"Allocation of resources to manage fire hazard within and among
regions involves considerable cooperation among decision makers and planners,"
Morehouse said. "In some areas we must be ready for more and possibly bigger
fires, whereas in other places fire managers might take advantage of predicted
wet conditions to carry out prescribed burns that will help reduce fire risk
in future years. Our workshop is designed to bring together key individuals
from the most affected regions in the
continental United States, along with climate experts, to discuss potential
fire risk."
Participants from the Southwest, Southeast, Pacific Northwest and California will discuss this year's wildfire potential and ways to incorporate more climate information into fire planning and decision making, Morehouse said. They will also be working together on proposals for future research that will lead to improved and new long-range wildfire forecasting and management tools, she added.
Workshop speakers include:
**Klaus Wolter, meteorologist, research associate with the NOAA Climate Diagnostics Center in Boulder, Colo. His expertise centers on large-scale climate variability and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation.
**James O'Brien, meteorologist, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies and also the Southeast Climate Assessment Project. O'Brien, a distinguished research professor at Florida State University, has expertise in meteorology and oceanography. Relevant web site, http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/bios/orien.edu
**Kelly Redmond, meteorologist, deputy director of the Western
Regional Climate Center and Regional Climatologist. Redmond's long-standing
research interests cover all facets of climate and climate behavior. He is a
faculty member of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.
Relevant web site, http://www.dri.edu/DAS/Faculty/Redmond.html
**Thomas W. Swetnam, ecologist and tree-ring scientist, director of the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree Ring Research. Swetnam has developed multi-century fire histories from tree-ring records. His research also focuses on patterns of forest fires linked to El Nino and La Nina sea oscillations that influence climate in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Relevant web link, http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/
**Francis Fujioka, research meteorologist and project leader, U.S. Department of Agriculture Riverside Fire Laboratory. Fujioka's research links climate processes and forecasts to forest fire management.
**Sue Ferguson, atmospheric scientist with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Forest Service. She is a member of the Fire and Environmental Research Applications Team at the Seattle Forestry Science Laboratory.
**Sue Husari, assistant director of the U.S. Forest Service Office of Fire and Aviation Management, Vallejo, Calif.
Workshop participants will present their results and action plans Thursday morning. Several will be available for one-on-one reporter interviews when the workshop adjourns at noon.
Mitch Battros
Producer - Earth Changes TV
http://www.earthchangesTV.com