Posts Tagged ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’
“I’d rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you.”*…
The devastation in the Los Angeles area is just the latest reminder that wildfires are a massive problem that continues to grow. Caleb X. Cunningham, Grant J. Williamson, and David M. J. S. Bowman put the threat into alarming perspective…
Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters…
An unlocked article from Nature Ecology & Evolution: “Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on earth.”
Looking forward: “Five Climate Realism Insights on California’s Wildfires.”
Apposite: “Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance,” from the Congressional Budget Office.
And very practically: “Wildfire Prep.”
* Tom Watson
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As we contemplate conflagration, we might recall that on this date in 1949, after two days in which a few flakes fell, Los Angeles “enjoyed” a real snow fall (the first that anyone can recall).
It’s later than you think…
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
…
“It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said today in a telephone interview. “As the ice skater puts when she’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.”
Read the whole story in this Bloomberg filing reprinted on BusinessWeek.com.
As we re-synchronize our watches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that the rings around Uranus were discovered. In fact, in 1789 William Herschel had discussed possible rings around the seventh planet. But it was only 23 years ago that, using the Kuiper Airbourne Observatory, the rings– 13 bands of extremely dark particles, varying in size from micrometers to a fraction of a meter– were definitively observed.
Hubble Space Telescope photo of Uranus, its rings, and its moons
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