Nobody expected the severity of 2023’s fire season. What about 2024?

The thing about last year’s wildfires? Sure, 2023 was devastating across the Northwest Territories and almost all of Canada. But it’s probably not the last time it’ll be that bad.

Steve Taylor, who studies how wildfires move and grow, calls last summer “a window into what would be average in the future.”

Taylor and other scientists recently produced a pre-print – an early edition of a paper, before it has been peer-reviewed – looking at just how bad 2023 was across the country, and what explained it.

The causes are those you would probably expect. It was really warm, for example: some 2.2C warmer nationwide than the historical average. It was a dry year, too, with many places (including parts of the NWT) inheriting drought conditions that began in 2022.

What turned those poor conditions into a nightmare season?

In part, timing.

Piyush Jain, another author of the pre-print, works alongside Taylor at Natural Resources Canada. He studies how weather and climate interact with wildfires.

“We had poorly timed ignitions,” Jain told Cabin Radio in an interview last month.

“Most of the fires in Quebec started in two days of lightning strikes. Other fires in Alberta and BC were also due to lightning. In fact, lightning accounted for 93 percent of the area burned in 2023.”

The problem with lightning, which also accounts for most fires in the Northwest Territories, is models can’t really help humans pinpoint the exact locations it’ll strike and which of those strikes will generate fires.

“It’s very hard to predict those,” said Jain.

Inside the NWT’s 2023 wildfire decision-making

That’s partly why Canada’s season was so terrible, even though fewer fires than average were recorded. An ordinary summer might involve 8,000 reported fires across the country, but 2023’s figure was just 6,700.

“Fire is a complex process. You need fuels or vegetation to burn, you need ignitions, and you need the right weather,” said Jain.

“It’s really when those those things coincide, in extreme fire weather conditions, that you get these large fires that escape initial attack or are not able to be suppressed. It’s a lot to do with timing.

“Even though we had fewer fires, the timing of those ignitions was when we had hot, dry and windy conditions.”

Some of them grew so large, in sustained conducive conditions, that they burned for four months or more. The NWT is waiting to discover how many of its own fires burned through the winter and are still smouldering come the spring thaw.

In summary, Taylor said, 2023 stunned scientists who thought they were experts in this field.

“There has been a lot of work in the last decade trying to understand what climate change may bring to different aspects of fire sizes, area burned. But this was really beyond what anyone had foreseen,” he said.

“We wouldn’t have expected these types of impacts for probably decades to come. The area burned, in particular, was surprising to pretty-much everyone.”

The way 2023 unfolded is challenging a system central to how Canada fights fires: the sharing of resources between provinces and territories.

NWT residents will remember that last summer, the firefighters coming to help weren’t just the usual neighbours from Alberta, BC or Ontario heading north to assist (though provinces did contribute significant numbers). Crews from the likes of the United States and South Africa were drafted in, too.

Taylor said Canada is built on a system of pooling resources because in a normal summer, not everywhere is burning at once. Last year, that changed.

“There was some significant fire activity at times – June, July – pretty-much across the country,” he said. “On a continental scale.”

What does this mean for 2024?

The US, Canada and Mexico jointly issue wildfire forecasts several times each year. The forecast for the spring was just published in mid-March.

In northeastern BC and northwestern Alberta, pushing into the southern reaches of the NWT, “above-normal fire severity is expected” in April.

The NWT is used to having basically zero fires in April, so it’s important to keep that context in mind – even a few fires would be above normal for the time of year. Much of the fire activity is expected to be holdover fires from last year smouldering below the snowpack, then possibly setting fresh fuel alight once the snow melts.

A big reason for concern is the way drought is leaving so much dry fuel around.

Parts of the NWT are super dry and getting no snow. See the charts.

Most of Canada “remains in some level of drought, with the most intense areas of exceptional drought still present in a broken area east of Calgary, and west of Prince George in central British Columbia,” reads the latest joint wildfire forecast.

“Extreme drought surrounds these regions, extending from south central Alberta into southwestern Saskatchewan, and in a broken band from central British Columbia to the Great Slave Lake area in the Northwest Territories.”

Even early fires to the south, in Alberta or BC, could have a significant health effect on the NWT if smoke from those fires heads north the way it often did last year.

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“Long-range forecasts all basically point to the same thing, which is it’s going to be a hot spring. Warmer than normal. Precipitation will be about normal, as far as the models can tell us, but it will be hotter than normal,” said Jain.

“Given that we’re already in drought conditions throughout much of western and northern Canada, it is definitely a cause for concern.”

But translating that into any sort of meaningful fire severity forecast in the NWT is extremely hard, he added.

“It all depends on sources of ignitions and the timing of those ignitions relative to when we have hot, dry, windy conditions,” he said.

“That is much harder to forecast.”