From The Atlantic:
The Forest Service Is About to Set a Giant Forest Fire—On Purpose
A man-made blaze on a remote Utah mountainside could provide valuable insights into the behavior of the powerful wildfires growing more and more common out West.
It will be among the fiercest controlled burns scientists have ever studied in the wild—“as close to a wildfire as you can expect,” says Roger Ottmar, the principal investigator for the Forest Service–led Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE). The goal? To collect data on every aspect of the fire at once, in order to improve the models scientists and land managers use to predict the impacts of fires. That will allow the agency to oversee more controlled burns on landscapes that need fire to thrive, and the data will also provide insight into the large, intense blazes that keep erupting across the West—the types of unruly fires that climate change and changing land-use patterns are making more common.
I would think the FS has had plenty of fires to study? I hope it doesn’t get away from them.
Maybe we could have a giant clearcut somewhere and they could study that?
Maybe the FS had money left over in their fire budget and figured this would be a good way to spend some.
Well, when you look at fire data going back even just 100 years it’s very questionable that “powerful wildfires [are] growing more and more common out West.”
I’m sure that some data from this late October or early November prescribed burn in a high-elevation patch of the Fishlake National Forest will yield some valuable information. However, unless it’s 90 degrees, with humidities under 20% and winds over 25 mph it’s doubtful that the data could possibly replicate the natural situation where a “powerful wildfire” would naturally and normally go through this type of ecosystem.
I’m quite sure there is a graph out there documenting how many homes have burned in the last 50 years, showing radical increases. Apples versus mangoes, when you compare different eras. If you just go back 60 years, there IS a very significant increase in annual wildfire acreage.
From 2000 – 2010 there was an average of 6.7 million acres burned and from 2011 – 2017 there was an average of 7.5 million acres burned. There is an increase in annual wildfire acreage burned in the USA.
Here is a portion of the proposed burn area:
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5505658,-111.9432226,2299m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
The fuels seem to be spotty, being in a dry part of the topography. They also plan to harvest conifers in a different area, to enhance aspen populations.
Although it wasn’t a prescribed burn, this idea seems to have worked very well in Grand Canyon National Park. The fire killed off everything above ground but, you can see that the aspen ‘mycelium’ survived quite well. Aspens should dominate this site for many decades to come.
I’ve seen some massive aspen patches around Cedar City. Maybe severe fires trigger massive aspen domination?
There was this interesting paper about aspen post-Yellowstone fires. It seems like post-fire they tend to reproduce by seed rather than vegetatively, which gives them a chance to adapt to whatever conditions present themselves today.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/03-4093
Maybe they had a follow-up paper?