WhatâÂD™s driving MauiâÂD™s devastating fires, and how climate change is fueling those conditions...

On 2023-08-10 20:53, John Robertson wrote:
On 2023/08/10 5:02 a.m., Fred Bloggs wrote:
Then Hawaii is full of invasives [ ecosystem type not the people
]:

\"Clay Trauernicht, a fire scientist at the University of Hawaii,
said the w= et season can spur plants like Guinea grass, a
nonnative, invasive species = found across parts of Maui, to grow
as quickly as 6 inches (15 centimeters)= a day and reach up to 10
feet (3 meters) tall. When it dries out, it creat= es a tinderbox
that=E2=80=99s ripe for wildfire.


And there have been wildfires on the Hawaiian Islands before. The
records are incomplete but prior to 2000 The average wildfire area
burned was 3200 acres on Maui.

In 2003 there were 8000 acres burned in Maui. The latest 2023 fires
burned 11,000.

There were fires after all...perhaps old newspapers can be scoured
for records. The mid 1930s is always useful for comparisons with
their massive heat waves, and the droughts of that period.

https://www.hawaiiwildfire.org/fire-resource-library-blog/fmt-wildfire-occurrence-publication

The PDF from 2014 is interesting reading...

\"For example, the degree of spatial colocation between fire ignitions
and road networks was surprising...\"

No, that isn\'t surprising at all. A large number of people have a
habit of throwing out refuse through the car window without second
thought. That includes burning cigarette butts.

Try taking a hike along a road sometime. You\'ll be shocked by the
quantity of litter on the roadside.

Jeroen Belleman
 
On Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 2:55:21 PM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:
On 2023/08/10 5:02 a.m., Fred Bloggs wrote:
Then Hawaii is full of invasives [ ecosystem type not the people ]:

\"Clay Trauernicht, a fire scientist at the University of Hawaii, said the w=
et season can spur plants like Guinea grass, a nonnative, invasive species =
found across parts of Maui, to grow as quickly as 6 inches (15 centimeters)=
a day and reach up to 10 feet (3 meters) tall. When it dries out, it creat=
es a tinderbox that=E2=80=99s ripe for wildfire.


And there have been wildfires on the Hawaiian Islands before. The
records are incomplete but prior to 2000 The average wildfire area
burned was 3200 acres on Maui.

In 2003 there were 8000 acres burned in Maui. The latest 2023 fires
burned 11,000.

There were fires after all...perhaps old newspapers can be scoured for
records. The mid 1930s is always useful for comparisons with their
massive heat waves, and the droughts of that period.

https://www.hawaiiwildfire.org/fire-resource-library-blog/fmt-wildfire-occurrence-publication

The PDF from 2014 is interesting reading...

\"For example, the degree of spatial colocation between fire ignitions
and road networks was surprising...\"

\"The extent to which fires in Hawaii can be analyzed in a cohesive fire
regime or regimes (Agee 1993) has never been ascertained, and wildfire
in Hawaii outside of research on the grass-fire cycle (for example, by
D’Antonio and others 2011) as a relevant landscape disturbance is rarely
mentioned in the scholarly literature.\"

As development occurs the risk of fire increases and the attendant
tragedies.

That\'s a pretty weak reference. But assuming their data is accurate, Table 2 shows on Maui the average acreage burned by individual fires to be less than 50. The pre-2000 data is a fictional total and not an average per fire. The fire they have there now is 100x bigger. Up until now, Maui experienced little midget fires.

Your reference to the 1930s for drought and heat wave anomaly is all the rage in the most recent denier media. Turns out the denier idiots don\'t know what a NOAA heat wave actually is. They don\'t use temperature to define heat, they use what they call apparent temperature, which is more or less a measure of the health effects of the heat. The very large heat wave index from 1936 does not mean the temperature was extraordinarily high, it means it was extraordinary for the 50 metropolitan areas they sample. Finally, it was not a natural occurrence, it was manmade:
\"A series of droughts affected the U.S. during the early 1930s. The lack of rain parched the earth and killed vegetation, especially across the Plains states.
Poor land management (farming techniques) across the Plains furthered the impact of the drought, with lush wheat fields becoming barren waste lands.
Without the vegetation and soil moisture, the Plains acted as a furnace. The climate of that region took on desert qualities, accentuating its capacity to produce heat.\"

https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_jul36

Heat wave by definition is four consecutive days of temperatures that have a frequency of less than one occurrence per previous recorded ten years. And those are apparent temperatures. As global warming becomes the new abnormal, heat waves by definition will diminish, since the temperatures are not that infrequent anymore.




John :-#(#
 

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