What made this year's wildfire season such a quiet one in the US?

AccuWeather

While Canada had a record-shatteringly bad wildfire season in 2023, the U.S. saw significantly fewer acres burned than average. Why is that?

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00:00 do have an elevated fire risk today from Moab to Durango, Colorado, back to Santa

00:04 Fe all the way out toward Flagstaff. I also want to mention in North Carolina

00:09 we are dealing with the Collette Ridge fire. It is currently 0% contained and a

00:14 little rain would go a long way to help this kind of fire where it is a bit of a

00:18 difficult situation in terms of the terrain. On that note, despite all these

00:23 events, it has been a pretty quiet fire season on the whole and I want to talk

00:28 about it. So we're gonna bring in AccuWeather regional expert Brett

00:31 Anderson. Brett, thanks for joining us here on this Tuesday morning. Always a

00:34 pleasure to have you. Great to be here. Now let's get into the fire season. You

00:39 know we were just talking behind the scenes and compared to last year, this

00:43 season is so very quiet. What's going on here with the numbers? Yeah, you can look

00:50 at the numbers here and actually last year was actually kind of normal. It

00:55 really wasn't above normal last year. It was close to normal. This year is just

01:00 ridiculously below normal. The number of acres burned just well below the 10-year

01:06 average here. So that's great news. Number of fires though, still about

01:11 average though and that really hasn't changed too much the trend, at

01:15 least the long-term trend, but the terms of trend of acres burned over the past

01:19 20 years, that's clearly going up. Now I have to ask you Brett, in terms of why

01:23 it's been such a quiet fire season, is there any one area you can pinpoint? I

01:28 know for example you and I have been talking about the monsoon season or as

01:31 some like to call it a non-soon where the monsoon was pretty quiet. Yeah, the

01:37 monsoon, you just think of monsoon, you think of all this rain and moisture, but

01:41 with the monsoon you get lightning and lightning is number one cause of fires,

01:45 especially in the wilderness. So we have a lot less lightning than usual across

01:49 the southwestern United States. Also less thunderstorms, less wind spread those

01:53 fires. So those are two big reasons right there. Also pattern was basically flipped

01:59 upside down across the western part of North America. Big Ridge of high pressure

02:03 across Canada got established early, dry warm conditions really fed the fire

02:07 season there. However in the western US we had more of a Pacific flow underneath

02:13 that high so that led to more rainfall, heavy winter snow pack which lasted well

02:18 into the spring and this also increased the humidity across the southwest so

02:22 with higher humidity less fire. Let's talk more about the Canadian wildfire

02:27 season for a second because you just mentioned how it was kind of that flip

02:30 of the pattern. Canada certainly suffered and we had a record-setting season this

02:35 year. Yeah, nine times higher than the average. Incredible, just an incredible

02:41 fire season here. It just stuck out like a sore thumb. Again the amount of acres

02:46 burned in Canada was equal, very close to the size of Washington State which is

02:51 just an amazing feat there. And again all this due to that basically the pattern

02:56 flip that we had across western North America. Very dry conditions and again

03:01 very little moisture in there. And also the winter snow pack across western

03:05 Canada was well below normal so everything that led to this big fire

03:09 season. Does not mean next year is going to be a bad fire season though. It can

03:13 quickly change from year to year but the long-term trend is for more acres

03:17 being burned certainly. One last question here Brett as we take a look ahead here

03:21 in the good old US of A, what comes next? Do you think we can say with this kind

03:26 of dull season we've had already that fire season has come to an end?

03:31 Technically yeah I think we can say that at the end of next week. We still have a lot

03:35 of fires burning but they're fairly small in size. Yeah some will

03:39 continue to burn into the winter but overall yeah I think with this pattern

03:42 change coming in next week, two significant storms with significant

03:46 rainfall coming in especially all the way down to California, I think by the

03:50 end of next week we could say that. That is some good news especially after last

03:54 year you know it's not such a bad thing to have a bit of a quiet season.

03:57 AccuWeather regional expert Brett Anderson always a pleasure to have you

04:00 on AccuWeather Early. Thanks for joining us this morning. Thank you.

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