00:00People think you need dramatic swings in weather to change fire behavior and you really don't.
00:12If it's three or four or five degrees warmer than normal at night, that's a big difference
00:17for fire behavior.
00:18Relative humidity, normally RH as we call it, RH goes up into the double digits at night.
00:25And what we're seeing more and more is RHs that are staying in the single digits all
00:30night long.
00:31And that just creates for really volatile fire.
00:34In the American West, average temperatures have risen 1.2 degrees Celsius over the last
00:40two decades.
00:42The warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation, not only from waterways, but also from soil.
00:48Over the same period, the West has experienced what scientists are now calling one of the
00:53worst droughts in 1,200 years.
00:58The climate's changing.
01:00It's resulting in weather changes, which results in significant fire behavior changes.
01:05And over and over, we are seeing high heat intensity, high extreme fires.
01:11So that brings us to this question of what do we do about it?
01:19Here we are battling planetary forces and a century of fire suppression that has left
01:25our ecologies weak.
01:27And so how do we regain both the strength of the ecologies and allow communities to
01:32be able to survive when these fires strike?
01:37First of all, there's a climate signal that's causing a lot of our forests to burn today.
01:43And so we're seeing much more extensive forest fires.
01:48We're also seeing that as a result of hotter, drier conditions, a lot of our forests are
01:54actually not regenerating after the fire.
01:56The fires are burning so hot, and then the conditions afterwards is not conducive for
02:03little seeds to be able to germinate and resprout.
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