Wildfires have shaped the environment for millennia, but they are increasing in frequency, range and intensity in response to a hotter climate. The phenomenon is being incorporated into high-resolution simulations of the Earth’s climate by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a mission to better understand and predict environmental change.
Two months into the 2023 peak summer fire season, Canadian wildfires had burned 25 million acres of land, disrupted the lives of millions and spread beyond the traditional confines of western Canada east to Nova Scotia. Smoke from the wildfires has drifted to heavily populated regions as far south as Georgia in the United States, across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and into the Arctic Circle.
The impacts are being incorporated into large-scale simulations of the Earth’s climate, such as DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model that reflects land processes like the carbon cycle for better predictions of the future climate. E3SM runs on the world’s fastest supercomputers, including the Frontier exascale system at ORNL, providing highly advanced simulations to better predict environmental change that could affect the energy sector.
ORNL scientist Jiafu Mao focuses on Earth system modeling, improving simulations of land surface responses and feedbacks to environmental change. The models evaluate synergies among historical fire data, carbon emissions, atmospheric factors such as temperature and precipitation, and major land variables such as vegetation condition, soil moisture and land use. His machine learning algorithms have supported better projections of wildfire and associated socioeconomic risk that can guide adaption and mitigation strategies.
Read more at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
