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Background There is an ongoing need for improved understanding of wildfire plume dynamics. Aims To improve process-level understanding of wildfire plume dynamics including strong (>10 m s−1) fire-generated winds and pyrocumulus (pyroCu)…
Author(s): Neil P. Lareau, Craig B. Clements, Adam K. Kochanski, Taylor Aydell, Andrew T. Hudak, T. Ryan McCarley, Roger D. Ottmar
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Background: Fire whirl is an extreme fire behaviour in wildland fires, and an essential factor for its formation is the surrounding generating eddy. No systematic experimental study has been conducted on natural fire whirls with varying heights of…
Author(s): Congcong Ji, Naian Liu, Jiao Lei, Linhe Zhang, Xiaodong Xie, Yang Zhang
Year Published:

An experimental study at a laboratory scale that aims to compare the fire behaviour in two configurations: a regular flat slope and a slope with an embedded canyon. In configurations of slope with an embedded canyon, a rapid increase in the rate of…
Author(s): André Rodrigues, Domingos Xavier Viegas, Miguel Almeida, Carlos Ribeiro, Jorge R. Raposo, Jorge André
Year Published:

Fire is one of Earth's most potent agents of ecological change. This Special Issue comes in the wake of a series of extreme wildfires across the world, from the Amazon, to Siberia, California, Portugal, South Africa and eastern Australia (Duane et…
Author(s): Dale G. Nimmo, Alan N. Andersen, Sally Archibald, Matthias M. Boer, Lluis Brotons, Catherine L. Parr, Morgan W. Tingley
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During the last 20 years extreme wildfires have challenged firefighting capabilities. Often, the prediction of the extreme behaviour is essential for the safety of citizens and firefighters. Currently, there are several fire danger indices routinely…
Author(s): Tomàs Artés, Marc Castellnou, Tracy Houston Durrant, Jesús San-Miguel
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n August 1910, wildfires swept through 3 million acres (1.6 million ha) of heavily forested mountain country in northern Idaho and adjacent Montana. About 85 people perished in the flames, and the Forest Service’s fire protection program was caught…
Author(s): Stephen F. Arno
Year Published:

Fire whirls are a particular case of flame behaviour characterized by a rotating column of fire driven by intense convective heating of air close to the ground. They typically result in a substantial increase in burning rate, temperature, and flame…
Author(s): Maryam Ghodrat, Farshad Shakeriaski, David James Nelson, Albert Simeoni
Year Published:

Extreme wildfires are a major environmental and socioeconomic threat across many regions worldwide. The limits of fire suppression-centred strategies have become evident even in technologically well-equipped countries, due to high-cost and a legacy…
Author(s): Sven Wunder, David E. Calkin, Val Charlton, Sarah Feder, Inazio Martinez de Arano, Peter F. Moore, Francisco Rodriguez y Silva, Luca Tacconi, Cristina Vega-García
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Large wildfires (>50,000 ha) are becoming increasingly common in semi‐arid landscapes of the western United States. Although fuel reduction treatments are used to mitigate potential wildfire effects, they can be overwhelmed in wind‐driven…
Author(s): Susan J. Prichard, Nicholas A. Povak, Maureen C. Kennedy, David W. Peterson
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Extreme fires have substantial adverse effects on society and natural ecosystems. Such events can be associated with the intense coupling of fire behaviour with the atmosphere, resulting in extreme fire characteristics such as pyrocumulonimbus cloud…
Author(s): Mercy N. Ndalila, Grant J. Williamson, Paul Fox-Hughes, J. Sharples, David M. J. S. Bowman
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Extreme Wildfire Events and Disasters: Root Causes and New Management Strategies highlights the urgent need for new methods to prepare and mitigate the effects of these events. Using a multidisciplinary, socio-ecological approach, the book discusses…
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Fire is a natural process that has shaped the history of Earth long before human presence; imagining a “world without fires is like a sphere without roundness” ([1], p.599). Evidence that massive and intense fires naturally occurred throughout the…
Author(s): Fantina Tedim, Sarah M. McCaffrey, Vittorio Leone, Giuseppe M. Delogu, Marc Castelnou, Tara K. McGee, Jose Aranha
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In large-scale mass fires generated in forests or by a nuclear event, the area of the fire is large (diameter 1 or more kilometers) whereas the flame height is relatively small (less than 10 m) creating a large turbulent buoyant plume. This paper…
Author(s): Michael Delichatsios, Jianping Zhang
Year Published:

This article is a Response to Adams et al. 26, 3756–3758. See also the Letter by Nolan et al. 26, 1039–1041. In a response to our Letter on the causes and consequences of the 2019–20 forest fires in eastern Australia (Nolan et al., 2020), Adams,…
Author(s): Ross A. Bradstock, Rachael H. Nolan, Luke Collins, Víctor Resco de Dios, Hamish G. Clarke, Meaghan E. Jenkins, Belinda Kenny, Matthais M. Boer
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Climates—especially seasonal and long‐term droughts—and fuel loads combine to determine risks of wildfires across much of Australia. Here we illustrate how long‐term accumulations of fuel combined with a serious drought to drive the behaviour and…
Author(s): Mark A. Adams, Majid Shadmanroodposhti, Mathias Neumann
Year Published:

Laboratory experiments were conducted to determine whether stationary fire whirls just downwind of a meter-scale turbulent flame are the lowest part of the counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) of the plume from the flame. Plumes from a turbulent pool…
Author(s): Masahiko Shinohara, Sanae Matsushima
Year Published:

From the front line of the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, NOVA tells the stories of residents who had to flee for their lives during the 2018 fire season. Scientists racing to understand what’s behind the rise of record-…
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Accordingly, the average annual risk of a wildfire destroying a home in the WUI was less than 1 onehundredth of 1 percent. Of course, the risk is much higher in fire-prone parts of the South and West, but so are expectations that government…
Author(s): Hutch Brown
Year Published:

Hypotheses that megafires ‐ very large, high impact fires ‐ are caused by either climate effects such as drought or fuel accumulation due to fire exclusion with accompanying changes to forest structure have long been alleged and guided policy but…
Author(s): Janice L. Coen, E. Natasha Stavros, Jo Ann Fites-Kaufman
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Large wildfires with uncharacteristically high severity are occurring more frequently in western U.S. forests. The increasing size and severity of wildfires has been attributed to both an increase in weather conducive to fire spread and changes to…
Author(s): Brandon M. Collins, Jamie M. Lydersen, Van R. Kane, Nicholas A. Povak, Matthew L. Brooks, Douglas F. Smith
Year Published: