PCIC Post-Doctoral Fellow Shares Findings in CMOS Bulletin

PCIC Post-Doctoral Fellow Megan Kirchmeier-Young recently wrote an article featured in the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society’s Bulletin summarizing recent research that she led on extreme wildfire risk in a region of western Canada. In the article, Dr. Kirchmeier-Young draws a parallel between epidemiology and event attribution in climate science, explaining how the likelihood of a climate extreme event can be affected by anthropogenic emissions much as how the likelihood of developing a given disease can be affected by behavioural and environmental factors. The article then explains the methods that she and her colleagues used, comparing the output of a large ensemble of climate model simulations driven with natural forcings only to a similar ensemble that was run using both natural and anthropogenic forcings, and the choice of metrics and thresholds that they used to indicate extreme events. Dr. Kirchmeier-Young then shares some of her key findings, including that the risk for extreme fire risk events in this region is roughly 1.5 to 6 times as likely in the simulations with anthropogenic forcings. The article concludes with the note that work is ongoing to extend this analysis to British Columbia.

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Read the original paper.