NASA s Wildfire Digital Twin Revolutionizes Fire Forecasting miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
NASA s "Wildfire Digital Twin" project will equip firefighters and wildfire managers with a superior tool for monitoring wildfires and predicting harmful air pollution events and help researchers observe global wildfire trends more precisely.
10 hours ago
As climate change brings more wildfires to the western United States, a rare fungal infection has also been on the rise. Valley fever is up more than sixfold in Arizona and California from 1998 to 2018, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Valley fever causes coughs, fevers and chest pain and can be deadly. The culprit fungi, members of the genus
Coccidioides, thrive in soils in California and the desert Southwest. Firefighters are especially vulnerable to the disease. Wildfires appear to stir up and send the soil-loving fungi into the air, where they can enter people’s lungs.
Scientists gather smoke samples during a prescribed burn at the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. (Credit: J. Juchtzer)
(CN) After a year of near-record wildfires that burned more than 9.5 million acres across the U.S. and turned California’s skies an apocalyptic orange in September, researchers are drawing attention to a little-known but potentially concerning component of wildfire smoke: infectious bacteria and fungi.
It’s already well known that the particulate matter and pollutants in wildfire smoke can cause a variety of health problems, from coughing to difficulty breathing to more serious issues like increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.