John Abatzoglou

Fire regime changes in Canada: an update Given the recent rise in extreme fires, we present an update to a previous Canadian wildfire trend analysis (1959-2015) with nine additional years of data (2016-2024), an improved area burned dataset,...

🔥 New fire paper out - Fire regime changes in Canada: an update. Overall, the big-picture trends remain consistent: annual area burned, the annual number and size of large fires are still increasing, but the total number of fires for all sizes continue to decline.
cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/...

09.10.2025 15:05 — 👍 25    🔁 15    💬 0    📌 0

Climate-linked escalation of societally disastrous wildfires Climate change and land mismanagement are creating increasingly fire-prone built and natural environments. However, despite worsening fire seasons, evidence is lacking globally for trends in socially ...

Out today in @science.org, we show wildfire disasters have surged in the last decade, as climate change intensifies fire weather and exacerbates other vulnerabilities.

📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

With @pyrogeog.bsky.social @climate-guy.bsky.social

02.10.2025 23:06 — 👍 60    🔁 31    💬 3    📌 3

Increasing global human exposure to wildland fires despite declining burned area Although half of Earth’s population resides in the wildland-urban interface, human exposure to wildland fires remains unquantified. We show that the population directly exposed to wildland fires incre...

🔥 Our new research in @science.org shows that people are increasingly exposed to fires globally, driven by overlapping shifts in where #fires occur and where people live.

But changes in exposure vary hugely by region and are shaped by different population dynamics.👇

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

22.08.2025 10:18 — 👍 58    🔁 29    💬 1    📌 1

Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US Forests Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests over recent decades. However, high-severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is also an important metric of fire activity given its d...

1/4
Please see our new paper just published in Global Change Biology: “Intensifying fire season aridity portends ongoing expansion of severe wildfire in western US forests”. 🧪🌍🔥

21.08.2025 18:31 — 👍 95    🔁 47    💬 5    📌 5

Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally Nature Communications - The authors show that extreme fire years in global forests align with rare fire weather extremes. Climate change has made such extremes 88-152% more probable. These findings...

Happy to share our new paper: we show that human-caused climate change is raising the odds of extreme climate-driven fire years across forested regions of the globe
@climate-guy.bsky.social @pyrogeog.bsky.social
rdcu.be/evJkX
#ClimateChange #Wildfires

11.07.2025 06:57 — 👍 53    🔁 32    💬 1    📌 1

Climate Change Increases Evaporative and Crop Irrigation Demand in North America The strongest climate change-driven trends in ETo are found in the water-limited southwestern and central regions of North America Forced increases in ETo have primarily been driven by increased ...

New study w/ @climate-guy.bsky.social ! Increased evaporative demand due to climate change has increased crop irrigation demand; in the Central Valley, this additional irrigation demand is equivalent to ~11% of the region's observed groundwater loss.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

02.07.2025 15:13 — 👍 49    🔁 30    💬 0    📌 4

Wildfires in 2024 - Nature Reviews Earth & Environment Wildfire burned area was 367 Mha in 2024, ranked 17th since 2001. An estimated 1,965 Tg C was released from these fires, 41% of which came from the Americas, far exceeding their usual 25% contribution...

Kolden et al. document 2024 wildfires, finding:

- 367 Mha burned
- Burned area decreased 5.4% from 2023
- Fires released an estimate 1965 Tg C

www.nature.com/articles/s43... (rdcu.be/ehnTP)

@pyrogeog.bsky.social @climate-guy.bsky.social @mattwjones.bsky.social @ueaenv.bsky.social

[6/n]

11.04.2025 18:36 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 1

Flyer header that shows a photo of John Mills and states the date and time as April 17, 2025 from 1-3 pm for the 2025 Wildfire outlook.

QR code to register for the zoom seminar and get full schedule.

On 4/17 @ucmerced.bsky.social Fire Resilience Center will host John Mills, CEO and co-founder of @watchduty.org AND have discussion with @climate-guy.bsky.social and Dr. Sandie Ha on:
1) The upcoming fire season in CA
2) How you can prepare, esp. for smoke

We're streaming it online - join us!

09.04.2025 15:09 — 👍 8    🔁 6    💬 0    📌 1

Perceptive article by Sarah Kaplan today about Sean Parks @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social et al. paper in Nature Comms last month, which made use of the North American Fire Scar network. Quoting John Abatzoglou @climate-guy.bsky.social, Susan Pritchard @susanprichard.bsky.social, me, and others.

12.03.2025 02:53 — 👍 27    🔁 7    💬 1    📌 0

CETD, a global compound events detection and visualisation toolbox and dataset - Scientific Data Scientific Data - CETD, a global compound events detection and visualisation toolbox and dataset

An integrated, interactive, and extensible platform for detecting and visualizing compound events. Our new paper in Scientific Data is now available: doi.org/10.1038/s415....
Thanks to my coauthors Mingfang Ting, @kornhuber.bsky.social, Radley M. Horton, Yaping Yang, and Yelin Jiang!

03.03.2025 18:04 — 👍 10    🔁 4    💬 0    📌 2

Contributions of Atmospheric Ridging and Low Soil Moisture to the Record‐Breaking June 2023 Mexico‐Texas Heatwave A heatwave with record-breaking intensity, persistence, and spatial extent affected Mexico and Texas during June 2023 Circulation, record-low soil moisture, and their interaction explain most of ...

New work with Dimitr Kalashnikov, Deepti Singh (@climatechirper.bsky.social) and Mingfang Ting!

We demonstrate that record low soil moisture and global warming were major contributors to a record breaking heatwave in Mexico+Texas in 2023

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

27.02.2025 15:55 — 👍 8    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned - Nature Communications Across many North American forests, recent years with exceptional area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees. Nevertheless, abundant...

1/n
Please see our new paper in Nature Communications!

We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥

Our key findings are as follows ...

10.02.2025 15:12 — 👍 306    🔁 136    💬 19    📌 19

Santa Ana winds are sort of the opposite of an Ice Cube. And, yesterday (and the day prior) was NOT a good day. climatetoolbox.org/tool/climate...

10.01.2025 01:13 — 👍 14    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 1

Tule fog fading with an extra push from the Fresno heat island

19.12.2024 21:47 — 👍 10    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Thanks @nathangilles.bsky.social for covering this new work by @emilywilliams.bsky.social

27.11.2024 20:56 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

⚡New paper on predicting #lightning 🌩️ in the western US using CNNs with @dmitri-climate.bsky.social @zacklabe.com @climate-guy.bsky.social and others.

Key finding: CNN are quite skillful at predicting lightning here.

We are using these to develop projections of lightning-ignited #wildfires🔥.

22.11.2024 19:07 — 👍 40    🔁 14    💬 1    📌 0