Winter and spring climate explains a large portion of interannual variability and trend in western U.S. summer fire burned area

Abstract

This study predicts summer (June–September) fire burned area across the western United States (U.S.) from 1984 to 2020 using ensembles of statistical models trained with pre-fire season climate conditions. Winter and spring climate conditions alone explain up to 53% of the interannual variability and 58% of the increasing trend of observed summer burned area, which suggests that climate conditions in antecedent seasons have been an important driver to broad-scale changes in summer fire activity in the western U.S. over the recent four decades. Relationships between antecedent climate conditions with summer burned area are found to be strongest over non-forested and middle-to-high elevation areas (1100–3300 m). Statistical models that predict summer burned area using both antecedent and fireseason climate conditions have improved performance, explaining 69% of the interannual variability and 83% of the increasing trend of observed burned area. Among the antecedent climate predictors, vapor pressure deficit averaged over winter and spring plays the most critical role in predicting summer fire burned area. Spring snow drought area is found to be an important antecedent predictor for summer burned area over snow-reliant regions in the nonlinear statistical modeling framework used in this analysis. Namely, spring snow drought memory is realized through dry anomalies in land (soil and fuel) and atmospheric moisture during summer, which favours fire activity. This study highlights the important role of snow drought in subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasts of summer burned area over snow-reliant areas.