Atmospheric Properties Associated With Large Wildfires

Abstract

Lower atmosphere moistures, temperatures, winds, and lapse rates are examined for the days of 339 fires over 400 ha in the United States from 1971 through 1984. These quantities are compared with a climatology dataset from the same 14-year period using 2-way unbalanced analysis of variance. The results show that the fire-day surface-air temperature and moisture differ from the climatology at the 0.001 significance level. Near-surface wind shear does not appear to differ significantly between fire and climatology days. Results are inconclusive for wind speed and surface lapse rate.