![]() being more and more important in that total annual area burned.”Īnd “significantly correlated” with that upward trend in scorched earth are increasing temperatures, he noted. “So what you’re getting is a trend towards more of the state being burned and bigger fires. “We also saw, though, that the number of reported fires does not increase over that period - in fact, it actually goes down,” MacDonald told me. That analysis culminated with 2020, in which more than 4 million acres burned across California - the most in modern state history. Across those 40 years, they saw a “statistically significant trend” of more acreage burned, he said. ![]() MacDonald and fellow researchers spent two years analyzing data on annual burn acreage and the number of wildfires in California from 1980 to 2020. ![]() “We’ve got plenty of time to dry these fuels further if we don’t get precipitation in the fall.” What do the recent decades show? “If you look at some of your really big fires, they’re late in the fall and they can burn right into the next year,” he said. “The fuels are ready to go.”Īnd in Southern California, he noted, our fire season has extended into winter in recent years, which could very well be on tap for the region again as we enter the back half of 2023. “At lower elevations, very high temperatures set the stage,” MacDonald said. Then came July, the hottest month ever recorded globally, which dried out much of the vegetation. He pointed to the York fire as an example, driven by two related factors.įirst, all that rain led to heavy vegetation growth, producing “a lot of fine fuels” in the form of grasses and shrubs, he said. Though our record-breaking winter precipitation and the cool spring that followed kept a lot of moisture in the mountains and along the coast, he noted that “it would be a really big mistake to feel that we’ve dodged a bullet” when it comes to lower-elevation regions.
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