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Florida Wildfires and ENSO: Is There a Relationship?
Reference
Harrison, M. and Meindl, C.F.  2001.  A statistical relationship between El Niņo-Southern Oscillation and Florida wildfire occurrence.  Physical Geography 22: 187-203.

What was done
For the period 1929-1990, the authors used tropical Pacific sea surface temperature data to classify each year of this interval as either an El Niņo, La Niņa or neutral year, after which they used annual fire data to calculate wildfire numbers, total acres burned, percentage of protected acreage burned, and average fire size for the entire state of Florida, USA, comparing the results obtained for each of the year classifications, as well as for years that lagged each classified year by one year.

What was learned
There were no significant linkages between any of the fire statistics and the current year's ENSO status.  When the fire statistics were compared with the ENSO status of the preceding year, however, there were several obvious differences.  For each of the fire characteristics studied, there was more of everything one year following a La Niņa year than one year following an El Niņo year, with the results for total acres burned, percentage of protected acreage burned, and average fire size being significant at the 0.004, 0.085 and 0.008 levels, respectively.

What it means
Once again - see El Niņo (Relationship to Extreme Weather) in our Subject Index - the warm El Niņo phenomenon, which is so unnaturally feared by climate alarmists, is found to be much more benign than the cool La Niņa phenomenon.


Reviewed 17 April 2002