Eight percent higher than the average of the previous 10 years
Updated Feb. 2, 2022
The number of acres that burned in the United States in 2021 according to the annual report from the National Interagency Fire Center, was more than the average of the previous 10 years. The 6,872,286 acres in the lower 49 states is 8 percent higher than the average of the previous 10 years, and 33 percent above the average in the decade before that, 2001 – 2010.
This is contrary to statements from some fire officials in December who said fewer than average acres had burned. That is only correct if Alaska is counted. When it is, the numbers can be misleading. Alaska is a huge state with a very low population for its size. Many fires there burn far from any structures or private property and are not suppressed. On some fires the only action taken is “point protection,” just keeping a small village or single cabin from burning. A fire can burn hundreds of thousands of acres over a period of months with few if any firefighters assigned.
The burned area in Alaska varies wildly from year to year, for example, about 62,000 acres in 2008 and more than 5,000,000 in 2015. In 2015 more acres burned there than in the other 9 geographic areas combined. (Alaska is it’s own geographic area. Map.) However, so far this year, Alaska has ranked only third in number of acres burned in geographic areas, outranking only the Rocky Mountain and Eastern Areas. Including the Alaska numbers in a calculation of fire activity in the 50 states is misleading and can radically skew statistics.
Fires continue to grow larger
The average size of fires 2021 was the fifth largest in the last 36 years. Since 1984 the six years with the highest average size have all occurred in the last 11 years, according to the available reliable data from the National Interagency Fire Center after 1984.
The total number of fires is on a downward trend
The number of fires in 2021 was the sixth lowest in the last 36 years.
All of the statistics for 2021 are from the annual report for 2021 published by the National Interagency Fire Center. Data from previous years also came from NIFC.
Firefighting agencies need to make changes to deal with the the new normal
Fig. 9 from the study below showing the proportions of heat detected on wildfires at night, vs. during the day. The MODIS (black) time series spans 2003–2020 and the VIIRS (red) time series spans 2012–2020. The horizontal dotted line at 28% indicates the CONUS-wide value detected by MODIS from 2003–2020.
In a study of wildfires in the conterminous United States from 2003 to 2020 researchers found that while fire activity increased during the day in the 18-year period, it increased even more at night.
Heat sensing data from satellites showed significant increasing trends in nighttime wildfire fire activity, with a +54%, +42% and +21% increase in the annual nighttime sum of Fire Radiative Power (FRP), annual nighttime active fire pixel counts, and annual mean nighttime per-pixel values of FRP, respectively, in the latter half of the study period. Activity during the day increased also, with rates of +36%, +31%, and +7% respectively.
Analysis of coincident 1000-hour fuel moistures indicated that as fuels dried out, satellites detected increasingly larger and more intense wildfires with higher probabilities of nighttime persistence.
The reason wildfires typically exhibit less activity at night is due to diurnal changes in weather. Nighttime generally brings lower temperatures, higher relative humidity, decreasing winds, and higher fuel moistures in light fuels.
But a warming climate with occasional multi-year droughts and higher temperatures can lead to nighttime higher temperatures and lower humidities. Drought will lower the fuel moistures in live and dead vegetation. These changes can result in fuels at night remaining available for significant and continuous fire spread. This is causing wildfires to burn with more intensity, spread more quickly, and have more resistance to control 24 hours a day.
About 15 to 20 years ago firefighters could usually count on wildfire activity slowing significantly at night as long as the wind was not extreme. Night shift crews could make good progress constructing direct fireline near the edge of fires. In the last few years weather and fuel conditions that permit direct attack by ground personnel, day or night, are less common. Fires are getting larger. Megafires that blacken 100,000 acres are no longer rare.
So now what?
As fires show increasing resistance to control we need to ramp up our fuel treatments, including prescribed fires, by a factor of 10. Less than full suppression of carefully selected fires when the season-ending weather event is on the horizon can have a place also, if they are very carefully planned and actively tracked and managed using all of the predictive tools available run by very smart, experienced personnel.
Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable; however, by reducing home ignition potential within the Home Ignition Zone we can create ignition resistant homes and communities. Thus, community wildfire risk should be defined as a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem. Unfortunately, protecting communities from wildfire by reducing home ignition potential runs counter to established orthodoxy.
We also have to realize that the fire suppression manpower staffing model that was created 50 years ago is obsolete. The agencies that fight wildfires, especially the federal agencies, need to increase the numbers of Interagency Hotshot Crews and engine crews. The crews must be configured and managed to allow personnel to have a reasonable amount of down time at the home unit even during the busiest times of the fire year. They can’t be away from home 90 percent of the time and expect to have a decent work/life balance. One National Forest will begin a pilot program in 2022 increasing the sizes of Hotshot and Engine crews to 30 and 10 people, respectively. This is intended to improve work/life balance and increase the availability of resources.
The reforms in the just-passed infrastructure bill to improve the pay and working conditions of firefighters must be implemented immediately. Slow-walking those improvements, a tactic too often used by the Federal agencies, should not be tolerated.
Technology needs to be adopted to make firefighting more safe and efficient. Firefighters down to the crew supervisor level should have access to real time data about the location of the fire and other firefighting resources 24 hours a day. Communications capabilities need to be robust and bomb proof.
On the afternoon of November 16, 2021 we initiated a 24-hour online poll on Twitter, asking for firefighters’ observations about nighttime wildfire activity.
Question for experienced wildland firefighters.
In the last 7 years on large wildfires, have you seen typical fire activity at night, more nighttime fire activity, or less nighttime fire activity, compared to 8 to 20 years ago?
Warmer, drier conditions that lead to more frequent fires in Canada’s vast boreal forests are threatening the dominance of black spruce trees that for thousands of years thrived in a healthy relationship with forest fires.
Black spruce trees and the thick layer of peat they take root in are great fuel for the fires. So typically, every 100 years or so, a fire would sweep through and take out a stand of these iconic boreal trees.
That same fire would warm up the black spruces’ waxy cones, releasing its seeds that would allow the black spruce forest to regenerate.
But in recent years, climate change has undermined the healthy relationship between black spruce trees and forest fires. More frequent wildfires are pushing large areas of black spruce forests past their recovery point.
As a result they’re being replaced by other species, and sometimes the forest doesn’t regenerate at all.
“We do see evidence of shifts away from black spruce dominance in more than one third of the sites,” said Jennifer Baltzer, the Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change at Wilfrid Laurier University.
This shift away from black spruce dominated-forests could have far reaching implications for the wildlife that depend on them — like caribou — and for the massive amount of carbon these forests store underground.
Baltzer is the lead author of a new study that analyzed more than 1,500 former burn sites across the North American boreal forest, between 1989 and 2014.
“This is one study, in a growing body of evidence, that we’re pushing ecosystems toward these tipping points that we don’t really know what comes next,” Baltzer told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.
Cascade Type 2 IA crew on Cub Creek 2 Fire in Northern Washington, July 25, 2021. InciWeb.
A team of scientists from British Columbia, the United States, and Spain say Western Canada must address the threats posed by highly destructive wildfires or face deadly consequences.
The scientists, including Mathieu Bourbonnais, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, predict devastating wildfires such as those currently burning in B.C. and elsewhere in the country will be commonplace by 2050.
The group has released a paper predicting billions of dollars in suppression and indirect fire costs as well as hundreds or thousands of premature deaths due to exposure to wildfire smoke if climate change and fire causes are not resolved.
The warning comes as statistics from the B.C. government show 1,251 wildfires have charred more than 4,500 square kilometres of bush since the start of the fire season on April 1.
Three dozen of those blazes are considered extremely threatening or highly visible and include the 395 square kilometre fire southwest of 100 Mile House that remains out of control and prompted an evacuation alert for another 161 properties on Wednesday.
Environment Canada has issued heat warnings or special weather statements for inland sections of the north and central coasts and much of southern B.C., as the BC Wildfire Service warns the combination of high temperatures and low relative humidity will make wildfires even more intense.
Bourbonnais, who spent years working as a wildland firefighter, says in a statement that a new long-term plan is needed because it’s simplistic and insufficient to blame the wildfire crisis on the forest sector or wildland fire management agencies.
“Wildfires affect so many facets of our society and environment including health, the economy, biodiversity, ecosystem function and more,” he says in the release.
“Wildland fire management must engage additional proponents, including Indigenous Peoples, industry and communities, to help people learn to live with the realities of landscapes and ecological systems that include wildfires but, over time, work to reduce their more catastrophic effects.”
The economic and social costs of wildfire response are unsustainable, the scientists argue.
Rep. Louie Gohmert. Still image from video of the July 8 hearing.
A member of the United States House of Representatives elected by the people of Texas had an unusual question for an employee of the US Forest Service Tuesday. Jennifer Eberlein, the Associate Deputy Chief for the National Forest System in Washington, was testifying during a live streamed broadcast of a hearing before the House Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests and public lands.
Rep. Louie Gohmert asked her a question. The topic at the time was climate change.
“I understand from what’s been testified to the Forest Service and the BLM you want very much to work on the issue of climate change,” Rep. Gohmert said. “I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they found that the moon’s orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth’s orbit around the sun,” he continued. “And we know there’s been significant solar flare activity. And so is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.”
After a pause, Ms. Eberlien replied. “I would have to follow up with you on that one, Mr. Gohmert,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, well, if you figure out a way that you in the Forest Service can make that change,” Rep. Gohmert said, “I’d like to know.”
After word got around about the unusual question, Rep. Gohmert tweeted about it. But he only wanted to clarify that he was referring to the Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter, and to make an accusation of “fake news” when someone quoted him correctly.
Astrophysicist Katie Mack weighed in:
There are two equally distressing possibilities for explaining this.
1) Gohmert thinks we can adjust the orbits of the Earth or Moon or tweak solar activity.
2) He’s knows that’s impossible & is being sarcastic because he thinks addressing climate change is always impossible. https://t.co/LFS9KF5ZK7
Combined shift in temperatures/precipitation for the 1991-2020 period compared to the 1981-2010 period. By Brian Brettschneider.
About 32 percent of the United States has gotten warmer and drier over the last 40 years, primarily in the West. The eastern two-thirds, about 66 percent, is warmer and wetter.
That leaves 2 percent of the country that is cooler and wetter — across the northern areas of Montana, North Dakota, Michigan, and Minnesota. A very tiny fraction, 0.06 percent in the northeastern tip of Minnesota, is cooler and drier. (Data from The Prism Climate Group and Brian Brettschneider)
And, it’s not only the U.S. that is getting warmer:
