Photo taken on Sept. 6, 2022 shows a burning building in Hemet, Riverside County, California, the United States. (Xinhua)
NANJING, Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- A new study has revealed that wildfire creates weather conditions that accelerate its expansion and air pollution exposure at a regional scale.
The findings published in the journal Science on Friday showed that an "unexpectedly strong" fire-weather feedback shared across diverse fire-prone regions, including the West Coast of the United States and Southeastern Asia, could be used to help inform wildfire mitigation strategies.
Wildfires have grown in frequency and severity worldwide over the past several decades, but little is known about how those elements could impact short-term weather related to fires, such as black carbon from fire smoke.
The researchers from Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, both in China, and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry found that the radiative effects of smoke aerosols can modify near-surface wind, air dryness and rainfall, thereby worsening air pollution by increasing fire emissions and weakening dispersion.
The study shows that the wildfire smoke plume in the western United States caused more hot-dry wind that speeds up the spread of wildfires.
Furthermore, the fire-emitted smoke in the Asian monsoon region is shown to decrease rainfall and then prolong the fire season.
Although extreme fires in the two regions are respectively affected by dry wind and precipitation, they share a common feedback mechanism -- both are driven by the radiative effects of fire smoke, according to the study.
The researchers suggested that early-stage fire suppression based on near-real-time forecasting could avert some extreme wildfires. ■
