LAB 022 - This is NOT a Drill!

About the episode

The fires in Australia have taken over the headlines for the last few weeks. The devastation has been absolutely awful. So in this lab, we wanted to dive into everything associated with the fires and how climate change plays a role in all of this.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) issued a report last week saying that 2019 was the 2nd hottest year on record. The hottest year was 2-16, so this means that we have put up the 2 hottest years on record in the last 5 years.

Have you seen the animation of the smoke from the Australia fires? NASA animated the smoke and aerosols using the UV Aerosol Index. (Source Image: viirs_rgb_omps_ai_australia_2019_12_28-202_01_08.gif)

NASA UV Aerosol Index. You can see smoke and aerosols from the Australia fires reaching South America.

Fires are not new to Australia, but they are worse due to a combination of factors. One of the major factors is climate change. In this episode, Dr. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick helps us understand how climate change is related to more extreme events like heatwaves and floods. We draw the connections between warmer climate, longer fire seasons, more fire fuel, and less rain at the end of the lab.

Be sure to listen and share your thoughts or questions below.

About the Expert

Dr. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a climate scientist interested in extreme events. She is a senior lecturer at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. She studies comprehensive methods of attributing heatwaves to climate change, and how we might be able to attribute the health impacts of heatwaves to climate change.

Additional Resources

Do you want to learn more about bushfire research? Past and future change? Identifying the human signal behind recently observed events? Check out the links below for more reading.

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/hennessykj_2005b.pdf

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0144.1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12520-2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46362-x

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL083699

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-017-2030-0