COEUR d'ALENE - Wildland fires are rampant this year in North Idaho, and if two University of Idaho professors are right, things are only going to get worse and more expensive.

Renaud Barbero, a postdoctoral researcher, and John Abatzoglou, an associate professor at U of I, just published a paper in the International Journal of Wildland Fires claiming climate change is going to lead to longer, hotter and drier fire seasons and an increase in "megafires" over the next 50 years.

The professors studied 30 years of historic megafires, consisting of 12,000-acres or more, that produced serious air quality issues and other ecosystem damage that could be quantified.

According to Abatzoglou, they also looked a several different climate change models to predict the weather conditions in the future and built a model with all of the data.

Abatzoglou said they looked for weather patterns and conditions during droughts, and things like the moisture levels in fuels in the areas that were selected.

"We broke everything down into ecoregions," he said, adding each of ecoregion has its own set of wildfire variables. "For instance, rangeland fires tend to occur a year after a rainy year.

"We wanted to understand historically what the recipe of ingredients was for these megafires," he continued. "We wanted to know under what conditions they started."

By the mid-21st century megafires like the Carlton Complex Fire that burnt 256,000 acres in Washington State last year and the Wolverine Fire near Chelan, Wash., which has burned 27,000 acres as of Friday, are going to become more prevalent, Abatzoglou said.

"They are going to be more frequent and seasonal windows will extend a bit," he said. "You can add a couple of weeks at the beginning of the season, and couple of weeks at the end."

Overall, Abatzoglou said megafire activity will increase nationally, but the most dramatic increases will occur from the Great Basin in northern California to the northern Rockies.

"In North Idaho you will see a 300-percent increase," Abatzoglou said. "This is not say that this will occur every year. We will continue to have years like 2011, but we are shifting the odds that more fires will occur like they have for the last three years."

According to the U.S. Forest Service the cost of fighting those fires is also increasing exponentially. For the first time in its 110-year history, the Forest Service is spending more than 50 percent of its overall budget on wildfire suppression.

The Forest Service released a report on Wednesday detailing how the increase in fires is impacting the agency.

"As the costs of fighting wildfires grow each year with longer, hotter, more unpredictable fire seasons, the report details how the Forest Service has experienced significant shifts in staffing and resources," the release said, adding the agency has nearly half a billion dollars less, in 2015 dollars, than it did in 1995 to handle non-fire related programs-the bulk of its programming. "There has also been a 39-percent loss of non-fire personnel, from approximately 18,000 in 1998 to fewer than 11,000 in 2015, while the fire staff has more than doubled."

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the release that climate change is the primary reason for the increased fire activity, but the agency cannot proactively prevent the fires because funding for activities, such as restoration and thinning projects, is being shifted to firefighting - it as term they call "fire transfering."

The report shows that today fire seasons are 78 days longer than in the 1970s. Since 2000, at least 10 states have had their largest fires on record.

"These factors are causing the cost of fighting fires to rise every year, and there is no end in sight," said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. "The release of this report is very timely based on the current hectic pace of wildfires in this country. We have been pointing out this challenge for the past few years, but we have not been able to effectively address it through our current budget process."

The report says by 2025, the cost of fire suppression is expected to grow to nearly $1.8 billion, but the Forest Service would be expected to absorb those costs into its regular budget, which has remained relatively flat. And if these trends continue, the Forest Service will be forced to take an additional $700 million from all the other programs. No other natural disasters are funded this way.

"We must treat catastrophic wildfire not like a routine expense," said Vilsack, "but as the natural disasters they truly are. It's time to address the runaway growth of fire suppression at the cost of other critical programs."

Jason Kirchner, a spokesman for the Panhandle National Forest, said those fire transfers have the largest local impact.

Kirchner said the local fires are funded out of a national budget for fire suppression.

"They hold back 50 percent of our budget to fight fires," he said, adding that money cannot be used for restoration or recreational purposes when they have a fire season like this year.

He said it is hard to quantify the growth in fire costs at the local level, because each year is different.

"We might have years like last year, where we hardly have any fires," he said. "But then there are years like 2012 where three-quarters of a million dollars was transferred to fighting fires. That is a big chunk out of our budget."

U.S. Senator Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, also issued a press release last week saying he and his colleague U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, have introduced legislation that would provide funding over the next five years for fire mitigation projects designed to prevent wildfires.

The Prepare, Ready, Equip, and Prevent Areas at-Risk of Emergency (PREPARE) Wildfires Act directs the Federal Emergency Management Agency to establish a funding stream specifically for wildfire mitigation. The bill would authorize $20 to $30 million per year for a five-year wildfire mitigation pilot program, as part of agency's Pre-Disaster Mitigation Fund. States and local governments would provide matching funds, leveraging federal dollars for maximum efficiency.

"FEMA directs a substantial portion of its resources every year to helping communities at risk of natural disasters prepare for such events by providing aid for things like flood preparation for hurricanes or modification to houses in Tornado Alley," Crapo said in the release. "However, it provides very few resources to communities at risk of being impacted by wildfires, which, those in the west know all too well, can be devastating to homeowners and communities. This bill seeks to address that disparity."

Lindsay Nothern, a spokesman for Crapo, said the senator is looking at multiple ways to provide funding for fire prevention and restoration after fires are put out.

He said the FEMA doesn't get involved with forest fires at all, and Crapo feels they should provide the same services they provide to other natural disasters that occur elsewhere in the country.

"Whether it is climate change or a drought, you can argue what's causing it," Nothern said. "But we are not doing the things we should be doing to prevent fires."