On California’s worst fire days, the real threat is not a single wall of flame but dozens of scattered lightning strikes quietly building toward one monster event. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UC Irvine say they have built a simulation that can forecast when those separate lightning‑started blazes are likely to merge into a single, fast‑moving fire complex.
The model is designed to mimic how flames interact with local winds and the atmosphere, including fire‑spawned thunderstorms that can whip up new ignitions miles away. Scientists say that if incident commanders can anticipate those multi‑front pileups in advance, it could change where they stage crews and aircraft on the worst days of fire season.
Study Finds Outsized Role For Multi‑Ignition Fires
A peer‑reviewed study finds that so‑called multi‑ignition complexes, meaning fires that start as several nearby blazes and later merge, punch far above their weight in California’s fire statistics. According to Science Advances, these events made up roughly 7% of the state’s fires between 2012 and 2023 but accounted for about 31% of the area burned.
The same analysis links fire mergers to faster spread, longer duration and more intense pyrocumulonimbus activity than single‑ignition fires, which helps explain why they so often end up in the “historic” and “record‑setting” categories.
How The Model Works
The team stitched together UC Irvine’s satellite‑based fire tracking with LLNL’s high‑resolution climate modeling, tapping the Department of Energy’s E3SM system, to see how multiple ignitions play off winds, moisture and each other…