This year's wildfire season fluctuated wildly across provinces. Here's a look at the numbers
CBC
The Prairies Climate Change Project is a joint initiative between CBC Edmonton and CBC Saskatchewan that focuses on weather and our changing climate. Meteorologist Christy Climenhaga brings her expert voice to the conversation to help explain weather phenomena and climate change and how they impact everyday life.
With snow starting to fly across Western Canada, marking the end to this year's wildfire season, we wanted to see how the past year's fires compared to previous years.
On average, about 6,000 fires burn around 2.5 million hectares each year in Canada, and our warming climate means we can expect longer and more intense fire seasons.
So let's dive in and take a look.
This season started on a wet note for much of Western Canada.
British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan saw steady rain right into June.
In Edmonton, we saw twice the normal rainfall for June, with 140 millimetres in the month. In western Saskatchewan, areas like Kindersley saw nearly 96 mm in the month, when they typically would see 67 mm.
The damp start to the summer made a big dent in the wildfire season.
"We had a very wet spring, which was great for wildfire mitigation as spring typically tends to be the time that we see catastrophic wildfires," said Melissa Story, a provincial information officer with Alberta Wildfire.
"It was followed up with a few months of hot, dry conditions which definitely elevated the fire danger … We saw a number of wildfires, but we were able to keep them contained."
Overall, Alberta saw more than 1,200 wildfires this year that burned about 153,000 hectares.
For comparison, close to 800,000 hectares burned in Alberta in 2019 during a particularly volatile wildfire season that included blazes such as the Chuckegg Creek fire near High Level, which burned well over 300,000 hectares and forced thousands of people in northwestern Alberta from their homes.
This year's wildfire number is slightly higher than the five-year average of 1,035, but less than the five-year average for hectares burned – around 208,000.
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