Researchers out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks have been coordinating talks with fire management teams and climate scientists to better address the potential risk for wildfires in the state of Alaska.
The discussion is twofold, according to Scott Rupp, deputy director of the International Arctic Research Center, with one project focused on the metrics on what fire behavior may look like on any given day using global climate models.
“And then the other project is also focused on using these global climate models,” Rupp said, “but also doing something called ‘regional climate modeling’ where we’re taking essentially a weather forecasting model but using it to downscale historic information, historic observation on a finer scale and on a daily time step to provide information that the fire scientists use on a daily basis to provide their forecast.”