NASA hosting Google Hangout on wildfires and climate change

A panel of scientists and researchers are taking part in a Google Hangout Friday to discuss what climate change could mean for wildfires in the United States and how the blazes are contributing to what NASA says is an earlier fire season with larger, more intense fires.

NASA research scientists Doug Morton and Bill Patzert, along with Elizabeth Reinhardt, who is the national program leader for fire research, research and development the Office of the Climate Change Advisor in the U.S. Forest Service will also answers questions during the online event titled “Wildfire and Climate Change” at 1 p.m.

Fires in the western United States are burning earlier, longer and with more intensity, according to NASA, which also said that ground surveys and its satellites have shown that fire season in the western part of the country is typically beginning earlier in the spring, leading to bigger and more severe fires.

Carroll Wills, the communications director for the California Professional Firefighters, a union which represents about 30,000 firefighters in the state, said wildfires around the country "certainly started earlier in the season this year." 

"Definitely something is happening in terms of the size and scope of wildland fires and it would be myopic not to look at the possibility that one factor is climate change," Wills told Al Jazeera. 

Wills said it is an issue that should be looked at not only for the safety of the public, but also for the safety of firefighters.

An ongoing wildfire in Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains has destroyed at least 26 homes there and damaged other buildings and structures, according to state officials.  The fire, which nearly 1,400 firefighters are battling, had spread to nearly 22 square miles (about 14,000 acres) by Friday morning.

Another wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona in late June killed 19 firefighters and destroyed about 200 homes. In the aftermath of that, Wills said firefighters in California conducted a training exercise on July 3, called Safety Stand Down, in which safety policies and procedures were reviewed in the aftermath of the Arizona tragedy. 

As far as the lessons provided by the events in Arizona, Wills said that "safety training is constantly evolving" and that every fire provides firefighters with new lessons. Wills also said that people buying homes in remote areas, where many wildfires break out, need to "move out earlier when the danger hits and not try to shelter themselves."

This most recent large-scale wildfire follows others earlier this year, including a deadly one in Colorado in June that charred more than 14,000 acres, destroyed over 500 homes and took the lives of two people.  

While no single wildfire can be pinned solely on climate change, researchers say there are signs that fires are becoming bigger and more common in an increasingly hot and bone-dry West.

"Twenty years ago, I would have said this was a highly unusual, fast-moving, dangerous fire," said fire history expert Don Falk at the University of Arizona at Tucson told The Associated Press, referring to the Yarnell Hill fire. "Now unfortunately, it's not unusual at all."

Wildfires are chewing through twice as many acres per year on average in the United States compared with 40 years ago, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told a Senate hearing last month.

The AP reported since Jan. 1, 2000, about 145,000 square miles have burned, roughly the size of New York, New England, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland combined, according to federal records.

Al Jazeera and wire services