Annual and decadal climate forcing of historical fire regimes in the interior Pacific Northwest, USA

Anticipating the consequences of climatic change for fire requires understanding of the causes of variation in historical fire regimes. We assessed the influence of annual and decadal variation in climate on fire regimes of ponderosa pine-dominated forests in eastern Oregon and Washington using existing, annually dated tree-ring reconstructions (1687–1994). In four watersheds, we compared the extent of low-severity fires (total area burned each year) to precipitation and the Southern Oscillation Index, a measure of variation in El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which affects weather in this region. At the annual scale, large fires burned during dry years and El Niño years (low SOI) in all watersheds while small fires burned regardless of variation in these climate parameters. Large fires also burned during relatively wet years and La Niña years (high SOI) in one watershed, indicating that local factors can override regional climate controls in some locations. Climate from previous years did not influence current year's fire extent. The influence of ENSO on fire regimes in this region has not previously been demonstrated at these multicentury, regional scales. At the decadal scale, fire extent varied with precipitation, perhaps in response to variation in such climate features as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Several decades of low fire extent in the watersheds during the early 1800s was synchronous with a lack of fire at other sites in North and South America, probably in response to a change in the global climate that included a lessening in the frequency and/or intensity of ENSO events.