Research Triangle Energy Consortium

Several readers of my wildfire blog suggested that I had given lightning strikes short shrift as causes of forest fires. In fact, lightning as a cause is not even mentioned because it is not in the top four causes, at least until 2015, as reported in the the paper I used, which is cited at the end of this piece. They plot the proportion of number of fires and area burned by cause of ignition in (a) the Santa Monica Mountains and (b) San Diego County. I am not reproducing the plot here for copyright reasons but interested folks can go to the link in the citation (Syphard and Keeley 2015) below.

Most such studies concentrate more on the area burned, than numbers of ignition, presumably because that is the net effect on the public and on the environment. Lightning as a cause is present in…