How are fires and their impacts going to change in the future?

Effects of predicted fires on air pollution and human health (UCLA )

We will estimate the combustion completeness based on our empirical model using the future vegetation distribution and characteristics from MC1 and the projected climate over the predicted fires, and then estimate the fire emissions of carbon and aerosols together with the future fuel loads from MC1. To evaluate the air quality effects from future fires, we will conduct WRF-Chem simulations for August-October 2051-2060. Two experiments will be done, one with difference future emissions and present climate, and the other with future emissions and future climate. The differences of PM and ozone between these two experiments will show the relative contributions from fire emissions and climate itself to air quality under the projected climate. We will predict air quality violations due to wildfire- generated PMs for each zip-code in the LA Basin, as well as population exposure, in different zip codes with the predicted population data (Sanstad et al. 2008) following the approach in section. These results can help identify which communities are most vulnerable to the air quality and human health effects of Southern California wildfires under future climate change.