What does the word superficial mean in this case?
A large portion of the trees seem quite burned to me and as far as I know green leaves do not combust very easily nor does bark protected wood.
again, from this article
" Why are structures burned down in wildfire areas where trees are not?
THE ANSWER
Many of the region's trees are adapted to surviving fires. Burn damage can still be seen on their trunks. On the other hand, houses are built in ways that make them susceptible to embers, which is one of the significant reasons wildfires spread."
Marlon added there are other western trees -- including larches, oaks and firs -- that are fire-adapted with features like thick bark and high canopies. Some trees and plants also adapt by being quick to regrow from the roots after the above-ground portion burns.
Yana Valachovic, a forest advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension, confirmed that was the case. “I visited Paradise a few weeks after the fire started. I have been looking through my photos and generally the area all saw fire, but a lot of the fire was on the ground and not in the crowns or the canopies of the trees,” she told VERIFY in an email. “Part of what prevented the fire from getting into the crowns of the trees were efforts to manage surface fuels to prevent fire from climbing from the ground up into the canopies.”
and from this article:-
But other findings did stand out, said Knapp, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station in Redding.
"It's often not the trees themselves that are necessarily contributing to fire. It's mostly the fuels that are dropped by those trees, like the litter," he said.
and again a quote by Dr. Jennifer Marlon, a professor and researcher at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from this article:-
Finally, wildfires don’t always decimate one area cleanly. “The structure of objects themselves, as well as their configuration on the ground, determines how the fire will move and affect things,” Marlon said. “Wildfires naturally burn in a very ‘patchy’ formation because of these differences in fuel shape and structure.”
Now do we trust the forest advisor's explanation or do we just go with "trust me, I'm smart" and with something like:-
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"trees are wood and wood burns so all the trees should have burned 100%?"
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"fire moves in a linear predictable way and burns everything it comes across"