Climate change supercharged a heat dome, intensifying 2021 fire season, study finds
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A new study has revealed the extent to which human-caused climate change intensified the extraordinary event, with researchers theorizing the heat dome was 34% larger and lasted nearly 60% longer than it would have in the absence of global warming. The heat dome, in turn, was associated with up to a third of the area burned in North America that year, according to the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment.
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It’s important to untangle climate change’s influence on extreme weather events like the heat dome, which are increasing in frequency and intensity, Diffenbaugh said. A lot of infrastructure and risk management systems are built around assumptions about how these events will play out, so if that changes, those systems become stressed, he said.
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And all indications suggest that that future is approaching quickly. Since the study was written, Canada’s 2021 wildfire season was dwarfed by that of 2023, which saw more than 45 million acres burn. Jain now has a preprint examining how heat waves played a role. Although there was no single event as extreme as 2021’s heat dome, some regions of Canada saw many more heat events than on average, he said.
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