Wildland Fires and Nuclear Winters. Selected Reconstruction of Historic Large Fires

摘要

Under the nuclear winter scenario, large wildland fires are expected to contribute to a general smoke plume and are considered potential analogues for the behavior of gigantic palls. As a means of testing the reasonableness of current estimates of a wildland fire contribution, we reconstructed from the historic record two major events; the Tillamook Burn of August 1933 and the 1910 fire complex in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Both events are near the upper limit for wildland fires--the Tillamook Burn for a single fire. For the 1910 fires, for which environmental data are feeble, we relied on a modern analogue, the Sundance fire (1967), for certain extrapolations. Reconstructed fire behavior and estimated smoke production suggest that current nuclear winter models overestimate the magnitude of a wildland component. Keywords: Forest fires; Mathematical models.