The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California
Open accessAbstract
Recent fire seasons have fueled intense speculation regarding the effect of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in western North America and especially in California. During 1972–2018, California experienced a fivefold increase in annual burned area, mainly due to more than an eightfold increase in summer forest‐fire extent. Increased summer forest‐fire area very likely occurred due to increased atmospheric aridity caused by warming. Since the early 1970s, warm‐season days warmed by approximately 1.4 °C as part of a centennial warming trend, significantly increasing the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD). These trends are consistent with anthropogenic trends simulated by climate models. The response of summer forest‐fire area to VPD is exponential, meaning that warming has grown increasingly impactful. Robust interannual relationships between VPD and summer forest‐fire area strongly suggest that nearly all of the increase in summer forest‐fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased VPD. Climate change effects on summer wildfire were less evident in nonforested lands. In fall, wind events and delayed onset of winter precipitation are the dominant promoters of wildfire. While these variables did not change much over the past century, background warming and consequent fuel drying is increasingly enhancing the potential for large fall wildfires. Among the many processes important to California's diverse fire regimes, warming‐driven fuel drying is the clearest link between anthropogenic climate change and increased California wildfire activity to date.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
An Overview of CMIP5 and the Experiment Design
Taylor, K. E., Stouffer, R. J., & Meehl, G. A. (2012) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/bams-d-11-00094.1 · Cited by 14,052
Warming and earlier spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity.
Westerling, A. L., Hidalgo, H. G., Cayan, D. R., & Swetnam, T. W. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1128834 · Cited by 5,176 · cited 2×
“Additionally, warming further reduces warm‐season fuel moisture in snow‐dominated areas by reducing snowpack and extending the snow‐free period (Evan, 2019; Kitzberger et al., 2017; Westerling, 2016; Westerling et al., 2006).”
BackgroundImpact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests
Abatzoglou, J. T., & Williams, A. P. (2016) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1607171113 · Cited by 3,073
Self-citationAn Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database
Menne, M. J., Durre, I., Vose, R. S., Gleason, B. E., & Houston, T. G. (2012) · Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology · doi:10.1175/jtech-d-11-00103.1 · Cited by 1,993
Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States
Balch, J. K., Bradley, B. A., Abatzoglou, J. T., Nagy, R. C., Fusco, E. J., & Mahood, A. L. (2017) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1617394114 · Cited by 1,043
Self-citationProjected increase in lightning strikes in the United States due to global warming
Romps, D. M., Seeley, J. T., Vollaro, D., & Molinari, J. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1259100 · Cited by 613
FEDERAL FOREST‐FIRE POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES
Stephens, S. L., & Ruth, L. W. (2005) · Ecological Applications · doi:10.1890/04-0545 · Cited by 584
Climate change and wildfire in California
Westerling, A. L., & Bryant, B. P. (2008) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-007-9363-z · Cited by 432
Relationships between climate and macroscale area burned in the western United States
Abatzoglou, J. T., & Kolden, C. A. (2013) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf13019 · Cited by 432
Self-citationHistoric Fire Regime in Southern California Shrublands
Keeley, J. E., & Fotheringham, C. J. (2001) · Conservation Biology · doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.2001.00097.x · Cited by 242
Cited by
Global and Regional Trends and Drivers of Fire Under Climate Change
Jones, M. W., Abatzoglou, J. T., Veraverbeke, S., Andela, N., Lasslop, G., Forkel, M., Smith, A. J. P., Burton, C., Betts, R. A., van der Werf, G. R., et al. (2022) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/2020rg000726 · Cited by 1,332
Self-citationAbram, N. J., Henley, B. J., Sen Gupta, A., Lippmann, T. J. R., Clarke, H., Dowdy, A. J., Sharples, J. J., Nolan, R. H., Zhang, T., Wooster, M. J., et al. (2021) · Communications Earth & Environment · doi:10.1038/s43247-020-00065-8 · Cited by 853
Global increase in wildfire risk due to climate‐driven declines in fuel moisture
Ellis, T. M., Bowman, D. M. J. S., Jain, P., Flannigan, M. D., & Williamson, G. J. (2022) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.16006 · Cited by 346
Record‐setting climate enabled the extraordinary 2020 fire season in the western United States
Higuera, P. E., & Abatzoglou, J. T. (2021) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.15388 · Cited by 341
Self-citationCollins, L., Bradstock, R. A., Clarke, H., Clarke, M. F., Nolan, R. H., & Penman, T. D. (2021) · Environmental Research Letters · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/abeb9e · Cited by 339
Metadata
- Authors
- Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Gershunov, A., Guzman‐Morales, J., Bishop, D. A., Balch, J. K., & Lettenmaier, D. P.
- Venue
- Earth's Future
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 2019-08
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 892-910
- ISSN
- 2328-4277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2956661266
- Cited by
- 1,088
- References
- 16
- FWCI
- 51.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1029/2019ef001210
- The paper
- Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Gershunov, A., Guzman‐Morales, J., Bishop, D. A., Balch, J. K., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2019). Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California. Earth's Future. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019ef001210
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
