Alexa Abano '25
In early May 2023, more than 100 wild land fires soared across western Canada. Normally, May is wildfire season for Canada, but this year something about it is abnormal.
Roughly one million acres of land have been burned, and more than 29,000 people in Alberta and British Columbia were forced to evacuate their homes.
“According to local experts, this type of ‘ferocious’ wildfire activity isn’t typical early in the year and firefighters don't normally see such a large area burned at once,” says National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
As of May 11th, Alberta has been hit with the hardest wildfires with 82 actively burning in the province, and 23 of them are out of control, leaving them with a total of 426 wildfires this year. In British Columbia, they have seen 179 wildfires with 46 of them actively burning and 8 being out of control.
“The arrival of sustained winds from the north has resulted in aggressive fire behavior on all wildfires within the north peace region,” says the BC Wildfire Service.
The fires were so intense that satellite imagery captured the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, Southeast of Edson, Alberta on May 4th. This is a thundercloud created by heat and smoke. The temperature at the top of the cloud was -60 degrees Celsius, close to the temperature of the tropopause, or the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
“On May 8, cooler weather and scattered showers arrived in the area, which has been helping firefighters battle the flames in areas they hadn’t been previously able to access,” says the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Informational service.
Despite their efforts, huge amounts of smoke have traveled across Canada and even caused a haze over parts of the northeastern and mid-Atlantic U.S.
“The change in wind direction can pose a problem for firefighters as the path of the fires changes suddenly” said Christie Tucker, spokesperson for the Alberta wildfire agency.
Smoke from the fires have caused terrible air quality and reduced visibility in several cities. “Air quality conditions on May 16 in some Alberta cities were ranked as ‘very high risk,’ the highest ranking in Canada’s Air Quality Health Index”, says Earth Observatory.
Unseasonably hot weather is expected to continue over the next few days in Western Canada. In British Columbia, temperatures are expected to reach 30° Celsius or 86° Fahrenheit through May 18, according to Environment Canada.
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