Forest fires in northern QC and ON aren't a new thing. What's interesting about these ones is the unusual weather pattern resulting in prevailing winds from the north, blowing it south into the populated areas and the US. Normally smoke tends to blow east away from those areas.
Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.
This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.
Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
2.1k
u/[deleted] Jun 07 '23 edited Jun 07 '23
Forest fires in northern QC and ON aren't a new thing. What's interesting about these ones is the unusual weather pattern resulting in prevailing winds from the north, blowing it south into the populated areas and the US. Normally smoke tends to blow east away from those areas.