As humans continue to move into the wildland-urban interface, or fire-prone zones on the outskirts of cities, fires started this way will become more likely. Many are ignited either by lightning strikes or human activity, including untended campfires, unextinguished cigarettes, engine sparks and equipment malfunction. Extreme heat and drought, worsened by climate change, kill trees and dry out grass and pine needles, providing abundant fuel for a fire to spread over vast stretches of land.Ī warming climate increases the likelihood of fires growing larger and more severe, but it’s not a guarantee that it will happen every year, said Andy Hoell, a climate researcher and meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.įires cannot start without a spark. Warmer temperatures increase the potential for wildfires, once ignited, to intensify rapidly, spreading faster and scaling higher mountain elevations that might have otherwise been too wet or cool to support fierce fires. Source: The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire But California’s wildfire record is punctuated with both “good” and “bad” fire years - a result of short-term, natural weather variability. The five largest wildfires recorded in the state have all occurred since 2018. But unusually early rains unleashed by a tropical storm in mid-September tempered the blaze and helped fire crews contain it.Ĭalifornia has seen larger, hotter and more intense wildfires in recent years, driven by extended drought and climate change. 6 northeast of Sacramento during a record-breaking late-summer heat wave. The Mosquito fire, this year’s largest, started on Sept. Instead, a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions seemed to play the biggest role. This year’s relatively mild wildfire season doesn’t mean that the landscape was much less vulnerable, that the forests were in better condition or that climate change had less of an effect on the intensity and behavior of wildfires than in previous years, Ms. “It’s really just that we got lucky,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. Wildfires have burned about 362,000 acres this year, compared with 2.5 million acres last year and a historic 4.3 million acres in 2020. Yet, by the year’s end, California had managed to avoid widespread catastrophe. Pictured: The LNU Lightning Complex which burned across wine country in August 2020.When a string of wildfires broke out in California this spring, experts saw it as an unsettling preview of another destructive fire season to come - the consequence of forests and grasslands parched by persistent drought and higher temperatures fueled by climate change. In early September 2020, a combination of a record-breaking heat wave, and Diablo and Santa Ana winds sparked more fires and explosively grew the active fires, with the August Complex more than doubling the Mendocino Complex's size to become California's largest recorded wildfire. On August 19, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom reported that the state was battling 367 known fires, many sparked by intense thunderstorms on August 16–17. The fire crossed seven counties and has been described as being larger than the state of Rhode Island. California's August Complex fire has been described as the first "gigafire" as the area burned exceeded 1 million acres. As of the end of the year, nearly 10,000 fires had burned over 4.2 million acres, more than 4% of the state's roughly 100 million acres of land, making 2020 the largest wildfire season recorded in California's modern history. The 2020 California wildfire year was characterized by record-setting wildfires that burned across the state of California as measured during the modern era of wildfire management and record keeping.
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