When the Thomas Fire raged through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in December 2017, Danielle Touma, at the time an earth science researcher at Stanford, was stunned by its severity.
When the Thomas Fire raged through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in December 2017, Danielle Touma, at the time an earth science researcher at Stanford, was stunned by its severity. Burning for more than a month and scorching 440 square miles, the fire was then considered the worst in California’s history.
Six months later the Mendocino Complex Fire upended that record and took out 717 square miles over three months. Record-setting California wildfires have since been the norm, with five of the top 10 occurring in 2020 alone.
The disturbing trend sparked some questions for Touma, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School for Environmental Science & Management.
“Climate scientists knew that there was a climate signal in there but we really didn’t understand the details of it,” she said of the transition to a climate more ideal for wildfires. While research has long concluded that anthropogenic activity and its products — including greenhouse gas emissions, biomass burning, industrial aerosols (a.k.a. air pollution) and land-use changes — raise the risk of extreme fire weather, the specific roles and influences of these activities was still unclear.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
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