U.S. Wildfires 2015: Are the Worst Yet to Come?

Thus far, 2015 has been one of the worst U.S. wildland fire seasons since modern records began.  More than 8.2 million acres have burned across the nation as of September 1, an area larger than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined.  Across the last ten years, that’s the largest amount of fire-scorched U.S. acreage for the January-August period, and it’s close to 50% above the decadal year-to-date average.  We are well ahead of the pace set in 2007, when 9,328,045 acres burned, the highest annual total in records going back to 1960.

There’s a more complex story hiding behind these factoids.  Certainly there have been some intense and large fires across the Pacific Northwest, pumping out smoke that’s reddened skies and clotted lungs across large swaths of the nation.  But up until August, the main factor behind this year’s large wildfire acreage (as explained by Tom Yulsman at Discover’s ImaGeo blog) was the extent of fire in Alaska.  More than 5.1 million acres had burned across the state as of September 1, most of it by midsummer.  With Alaska’s fire activity now slowing down, the state’s total affected acreage will likely rank second behind 2004, when a total of 6,590,140 Alaskan acres went up in flames.

It was clear by early summer that the Pacific Northwest was in line for a potentially rough fire season, with long stretches of record spring and summer heat following a winter with record-low snowpack. ... Wildfires didn’t begin taking full advantage of the Pacific Northwest’s primed-for-fire condition until mid-August, when the Okanogan Complex roared to life across north-central Washington.  Now the state’s largest assemblage of wildfires on record, the Okanogan Complex (40 percent contained as of Tuesday) has destroyed more than 170 homes.
...
Climate change and wildfire risk

One of the key points made by President Barack Obama in his visit to Alaska this week (including Wednesday’s scheduled stop north of the Arctic Circle, the first ever by a president in office) is the role of human-induced climate change in exacerbating wildfire risk across the state.  In a speech delivered Monday in Anchorage, Obama noted:  “Alaska’s fire season is now more than a month longer than it was in 1950.  At one point this summer, more than 300 wildfires were burning at once.”  The lengthening fire season in Alaska reflects a global trend:  a new open-access analysis published in Nature Comunications in July found that 25% of Earth’s vegetated surface saw fire seasons grow longer from 1979 to 2013 by an average of close to 20%.

Read more at U.S. Wildfires 2015:  Are the Worst Yet to Come?