The West Pacific Teleconnection Drives the Interannual Variability of Autumn Wildfire Weather in the Western United States After 2000

Abstract

Wildfires pose a significant threat to human society as severe natural disasters. The western United States (US) is one hotspot that has experienced dramatic influences from autumn wildfires especially after 2000, but what has caused its year-to-year variations remains poorly understood. By analyzing observational and atmospheric reanalysis datasets, we found that the West Pacific (WP) pattern centered in the western North Pacific acted as a major climatic factor to the post-2000 autumn wildfire activity by inducing anomalous high pressure over the western US via teleconnections with increased surface temperature, decreased precipitation, and reduced relative humidity. The WP pattern explains about one-third of the post-2000 years-to-year variance of the western US autumn wildfires. These effects were found to be much weaker in the 1980–1990s, as the active region of WP-associated high pressure was confined to the eastern North Pacific. Such eastward shift of the WP teleconnection pattern and its resultant, enhanced influence on the weather conditions of western US autumn wildfire after 2000 are also captured by the sea surface temperature (SST)-forced atmospheric model simulations with the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 (CAM6). The CAM6 ensemble-mean changes in the WP teleconnection pattern at 2000 is about half of the observed changes, which implies that external radiative forcing and/or SST changes have played an important role in the WP pattern shift. Our results highlight a pressing need to consider the joint impacts of atmospheric internal variability and externally forced climate changes when studying the interannual variations of wildfire activity.