Wildfires across the United States have been getting more frequent and devastating over the past three decades.
This trend is only expected to accelerate as climate change takes its toll, an American Geophysical Union news release reported.
The numbers of wildfires that were at least 1,000 acres in size located between Nebraska and California increased by seven per year from 1984 to 2011; the total area of these fires increased by about 90,000 acres.
"We looked at the probability that increases of this magnitude could be random, and in each case it was less than one percent," Philip Dennison, an associate professor of geography at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and lead author of the paper, said in the news release.
The researchers used satellite data to look at areas that had been damage by fires since 1984 as well as climate variables over the same time period.
The research team found that most regions experienced an increase in wildfires as well as drought severity.
"Twenty eight years is a pretty short period of record, and yet we are seeing statistically significant trends in different wildfire variables-it is striking," Max Moritz, a co-author of the study and a fire specialist at the University of California-Berkeley Cooperative Extension, said in the news release.
The study suggests "large-scale climate factors" could be affecting the forest fires as opposed to localized conditions.
"Most of these trends show strong correlations with drought-related conditions which, to a large degree, agree with what we expect from climate change projections," Moritz said.
Other contributing factors include invasive species and past fire suppression actions.
"It could be that our past fire suppression has caught up with us, and an increased area burned is a response of more continuous fuel sources," Jeremy Littell of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) at the Alaska Climate Science Center, said in the news release . "It could also be a response to changes in climate, or both."
