Abstract
Recent increasing wildfire activities in California have raised widespread public concerns. This raises a question as to whether the increase of of fire weather this year and in recent decades is mainly due to weather pattern change dominated by natural variability or anthropogenic warming. We observed that vapor pressure deficit (VPD), an important fire weather risk index, in the warm season (May to September) of California, has increased significantly since 1979, with a positive trend of 0.70 hPa or 0.50 σ per decade, and this trend is also significant for VPD in large fire days; trend analysis of saturated and actual vapor pressure suggests that direct warming and drying contributes to about 70% and 30%, respectively, to the positive VPD trend. This increase of VPD and warming for such a short period cannot be simply linked to anthropogenic factors as it can also be affected by circulation changes. Our self-organizing maps analysis reveals the close relationship between VPD and circulation. Using a flow analogue approach, we estimated circulation changes contribute to about half (54%) of the observed VPD trend. Since circulation changes represent the upper limit of internal variability of the climate system because both the internal climate variability and anthropogenic forcings can contribute to such a change, our results suggest that anthropogenic warming must explain at least the other half of the observed VPD trend.
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