The one-two punch of nasty wildfires followed by heavy downpours, triggering flooding and mudslides, will strike the U.S. West far more often in a warming-hopped world, becoming a frequent occurrence, a new study said.
That fire-flood combination, with extreme drenchings hitting a spot that burned within a year, could increase as much as eight-fold in the Pacific Northwest, double in California and jump about 50% in Colorado by the year 2100 in a worst-case climate change scenario of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study in Friday’s Science Advances.
“One disaster is bad. Two disasters in rapid succession is even worse because you’re already reeling from the first one,” said study co-author Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara. “But in the particular case of wildfire plus extreme rain, the wildfire is setting you up for worse consequences because you’re losing your vegetation, you’re changing soil properties and making that landscape more conducive to destructive flooding.
For study co-author Daniel Swain, a western weather expert at UCLA who lives in Colorado, it hit even closer to home. Last week, he had to evacuate his Boulder home because of a fire. Today is the start of flash flood season. The report looked at 11 Western U.S. states, concentrating on four of them where the projected increase in fires followed by downpours was most noticeable.
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