Why are the Canadian wildfires so bad?
The Forest Burning in Canada is Burning Like a Thing: Implications for Wildfires and Fires in the Eastern Suburbs
Gerald Cheng, the warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, is unsure if the rain will be enough. He said in a media availability on Saturday morning that southwest Quebec could get some precipitation on Sunday, whereas the fires in northern Quebec won’t get any rain until Tuesday.
It’ll be about 10 to 20 millimeters — less than an inch — of water. The impact it will have on the fires will depend on the size of the blaze, which could grow before the rain.
It is not common for the smoke to affect so many people. The reason for the orange skies in New York City and elsewhere this past week is a large low-pressure system that has been sitting over Maine for several days. The system is dragging the smoke south to the eastern seaboard, when it is not allowing it to reach the east. The system should start to break up over the weekend, bringing some relief.
The emergency alert system instructed people in the towns of Edson and Yellowhead County to leave due to the “increasingly unpredictable” fires.
As of Saturday the government reported 75 active wildfires in the province. Quebec has 133 active forest fires with 72 of them considered to be out of control.
The warmth and lack of rain left soils and forests as dry as tinder, so when a fire ignites it can grow and spread quickly — including in places where large, destructive fires are usually rare, such as the eastern provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It has been a record year for forest burning in Canada, with over 4 million hectares burnt so far this year, double the average of the previous century and a number that is usually reached late in the season.
We aren’t out of the woods yet despite the huge areas that have burned this year. Depending on the weather, the fires could continue for months with little respite. “If the warm dry weather continues, there is lots of fuel in the forest to burn,” says Taylor. It won’t be exhausted soon.
Smoke from fires in eastern Canada has been filling lungs and turning skies orange across the northeastern United States for the past week. Although people in western North America have gotten used to such conditions in the past few years, they are unusual in the eastern part of the continent — so what is causing this extraordinary fire season?
There is no solid explanation for this year’s anomalous spring. Piyush Jain, a research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service, says it is unlikely to be related to an El Niño climate pattern, which brings warmer temperatures to the eastern Pacific Ocean and tends to warm the planet as a whole. According to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, an El Nio has arrived, but it is not expected to have much effect until later in the year. Still, extraordinary weather is not unexpected as the planet warms. “Climate change is definitely a factor that is causing these extreme conditions to occur more frequently,” says Jain.
