Abstracts and Presenter Biographical Information Oral Presentations
ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ORAL PRESENTATIONS Abstracts for oral presentations and biographical information for presenters are listed alphabetically below by presenting author’s last name. Abstracts and biographical information appear unmodified, as submitted by the corresponding authors. Day, time, and room number of presentation are also provided. Abatzoglou, John John Abatzoglou, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Idaho. Research interests span the weather-climate continuum and both basic and applied scientific questions on past, present and future climate dynamics as well as their influence on wildfire, ecology and agriculture and is a key player in the development of integrated climate scenarios for the Pacific Northwest, US. Oral presentation, Wednesday, 2:30 PM, B114 Will climate change increase the occurrence of megafires in the western United States? The largest wildfires in the western United States account for a substantial portion of annual area burned and are associated with numerous direct and indirect geophysical impacts in addition to commandeering suppression resources and national attention. While substantial prior work has been devoted to understand the influence of climate, and weather on annual area burned, there has been limited effort to identify factors that enable and drive the very largest wildfires, or megafires. We hypothesize that antecedent climate and shorter-term biophysically relevant meteorological variables play an essen- tial role in favoring or deterring historical megafire occurrence identified using the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Atlas from 1984-2010. Antecedent climatic factors such as drought and winter and spring temperature were found to vary markedly across geographic areas, whereas regional commonality of prolonged extremely low fuel moisture and high fire danger prior to and immediately following megafire discovery.
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