'It eats everything'—the new breed of wildfire that's impossible to predict
...
New normal
There have been signs of trouble since the 1990s, according to Castellnou.
"This change has been cooking for a long time, but the first time we realised something wrong was happening were the years 2009 and 2012," he said, referring to the Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria that killed 173 people and wildfires in Spain, Portugal, Chile and California, US. Many in the fire community initially thought these were just abnormal events, he says.
But then wildfires in Chile and Portugal in 2017 indicated that those weren't simply extreme years. "That was the new normal arriving. 2018 has confirmed that," he said, referring to the deadly wildfires in Greece and in California.
On October 15, 2017, Castellnou was in central Portugal to conduct analysis then support the local services as the wildfires became firestorms.
...
In the past, he says, a fire that destroyed 25,000 hectares a day was considered extreme. According to his figures, the October fires in Portugal consumed 220,000 hectares of forest, an area 22 times the size of Lisbon and killed more than 40 people. Castellnou says that at their peak, wildfires burned at a rate of 10,000 hectares per hour over seven hours.
"This is something that blew my mind and I cannot use technology to simulate that because models can't predict it,"
...
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-everythingthe-wildfire-impossible.html