Sci Adv. 2025 Feb 14;11(7):eadt5088. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adt5088. Epub 2025 Feb 12.
ABSTRACT
Climate change affects lightning frequency and wildfire intensity globally. To date, model limitations have prevented quantifying climate-lightning-wildfire interactions comprehensively. We exploit advances in Earth System modeling to examine these three-way interactions and their sensitivities to idealized CO2 forcing in 140-year simulations. Lightning sensitivity to global temperature change (+1.6 ± 0.1% per kelvin) is mitigated by compensating atmospheric effects. Global burned area sensitivity to temperature (+13.8 ± 0.3% per kelvin) is largely driven by intensified fire weather and increased biomass but marginally by lightning changes. We find a universal law characterizing regional-scale modeled fire activity and its CO2 sensitivity, consistent with basic principles of statistical mechanics. Last, a negative climate feedback through intensified aerosol direct effect from fire emissions reaches an equivalent decrease of 0.91 ± 0.01% in CO2 radiative forcing. However, this feedback contributes to polar amplification. Our analysis shows that climate-lightning-wildfire interactions involve multiple compensating and amplifying feedbacks, which are sensitive to anthropogenic CO2 forcing.
PMID:39937907 | DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adt5088
