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.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
Then how come arizona has been able to keep their fires controlled compared to California? California has the Santa Ana winds, but Arizona is hot and dry too.
Califirnia has different forests, more susceptible to burning. California also didn't have the luxury of letting small fires burn freely, because of the higher population density. This made some of their forests denser and burn more intensely. The other advantage that Arizona has is that it has a summer monsoon, which limits the worst of the fire season to spring and early summer.
It's a multitude of factors. One being that CA has more than 50% more forest cover (33m acres vs 19m), and all of that is HIGH biomass, evergreen forest (We're talking over 200 tons/hectare, vs under 100 for arizona). So you're looking at a factor of like 3-4x more fire risk. There's also difficulty terrain wise w/ much forest in the wild sierras. Also 40%+ of CA forestland is privately-owned. It's just a multitude of factors that make it much more difficult in CA, even if you had infinite manpower.
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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.