Earth Protect Blog

By Seth Borenstein

The Associated Press

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 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 eightfold 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.

The study said that as human-caused climate change intensifies, 90% of extreme fire events will be followed by at least three extraordinary downpours in the same location within five years.

Study authors said it’s because even though the West is getting drier overall — making wildfire season longer — concentrated bursts of intense rain are increasing and coming earlier so areas can get hurt by both extremes.

“One disaster is bad. Two disasters in rapid succession is even worse because you’re already reeling from the first one,” said study coauthor 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.”

Stevenson knows because the Thomas fire, which started in late 2017 and was followed a month later by a downpour of half an inch of rain in just five minutes, caused mudslides in Montecito that killed 23 people.

“Oh yeah, it was crazy,” Stevenson said. “Like the entire highway was blocked off with like a wall of mud. There were boulders in people’s living rooms.”

For study co-author Daniel Swain, a western weather expert at UCLA who lives in Colorado, it hit even closer to home. He recently had to evacuate his Boulder home because of a fire. Flash flood season also just started.

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.

Study authors acknowledged that the worst-case warming scenario they studied, using dozens of large-scale climate model simulations, is becoming increasingly less likely because many but not all countries, including the United States and Europe, have been cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases.