Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Canadian wildfires once again stretch to US

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Smoke from wildfires in the Canadian province of Alberta could blanket parts of the US and trigger air quality warnings as far east as Chicago, according to some government forecasts, The New York Times reports.

Sky during a wildfire (kathryn via Flickr Creative Commons)

The wildfire season in the Canadian Rockies generally starts in March, and wildfires earlier this year prompted air quality warnings in the US as well, including in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Unlike last year, when large fires burned millions of hectares, smaller fires like the one in Jasper National Park in rural Alberta have forced the evacuation of several thousand people.

A prolonged drought in parts of Western Canada has some forecasters worried that this year could be worse than last. “The temperature trends are very concerning. With the heat and dryness across the country, we can expect that the wildfire season will start sooner and end later and potentially be more explosive,” The Sherwood Park-Strathcona County News quoted Minister of Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan as saying before this year’s season began.

Zombie Fires

Wildfire fighting is becoming a year-round effort in Canada, the Yale Climate Connection wrote in May, based on a story by The Energy Mix. Blazes smolder through the winter, they wrote, often underground or under snow, and emerge in the spring. In late February, more than 150 wildfires were burning in Western Canada, “hold-over” blazes, or “zombie fires,” from the Canadian inferno of 2023.

“We’ve seen this before but never at this scale,” the site quoted wildfire expert Michael Flannigan as saying, based on an article in the Washington Post. He’s the Innovation Research Chair in Predictive Services, Emergency Management, and Fire Science at Thompson Rivers University. “I’ve been watching fires in Canada and abroad since the late ’70s. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Climate Change Impact

It can be challenging to quantify the precise impact of climate change on any one season of wildfires. Compounding forces from three years of drought in Western Canada and warming air temperatures are somewhat offset by increasing precipitation caused by the atmosphere’s increasing temperatures in coastal regions. However, research has shown that wildfire seasons are getting longer.

Paul Katulahttps://news.schoolsdo.org
Paul Katula is the executive editor of the Voxitatis Research Foundation, which publishes this blog. For more information, see the About page.

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