Enormous wildfires spark scramble to improve fire models

(Nature) Jeff Tollefson, Aug. 31

…“Something is definitely different, and it raises questions about how much we really know,” says Max Moritz, a fire scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

… The problem, Moritz says, is that most of the fire models in use today are based on data from the past two or three decades. But it seems that fire behaviour might be shifting in response to climate faster than anybody expected, and that makes it increasingly problematic to extrapolate from past trends, he adds.