A tale of two wildfire seasons.

The disparities in wildfire seasons between Canada and the USA emphasize that factors beyond climate change influence fire intensity and frequency.

Comparing and Contrasting the Fire Season in the USA and Canada

The 2023 fire season in the USA has been one of the least severe on record. According to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), as of October 13, 2023, a total of 2.57 million acres have burned in the USA this year. This is significantly below the 10-year average (2013-2022) of 6.22 million acres burned.

In contrast, the 2023 fire season in Canada has been more severe, with over 18.5 million hectares (45 million acres) burned so far this year. This compares to an average of 2.7 million hectares burned over the past decade.

Source: https://ciffc.ca/

Trends in Wildfire Activity in the USA and Canada Over the Last Century

Wildfire activity in both the USA and Canada has been decreasing over the past century. This is due to several factors, including fire suppression technology and land use changes.

Population growth continues to increase the risk of wildfire activity. As more people move into fire-prone areas, the risk of human-caused fires increases. Additionally, land use changes, such as the conversion of forests to agricultural land, can change fire behavior.

For more about the history of fire in the USA see:

In the above article, I received some pushback for using this figure.

It was mentioned that the following is stated on the NFIC website:

Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.

It has been noted that numerous federal, state, and local entities each recorded fire data in their unique styles, adopting varied methods to document diverse data sets. Thus the records are marred by innate reporting biases, discrepancies, and inaccuracies or ambiguities in the data.

To address these problems, a research study was published in the journal Ecological Applications titled, “Climate and wildfire area burned in western U.S. ecoprovinces, 1916–2003” and contains the following figure which shows fire history in 11 western states over the last century.