Will Canada’s Fires and Toxic Air Be Back?

British Columbia shifting to year-round wildfire readiness. The season doesn’t end anymore.
Conditions remained abnormally warm and dry thru the winter across Canada, but especially in the western provinces. Abnormally large number of “zombie fires” smoldered thru the winter and have been erupting in to activity in recent weeks.

British Columbia Wildfire Dashboard:

There are 90 active holdover fires from the 2023 season that have smouldered beneath the winter snow cover. All of these incidents are Under Control. The number of holdovers in primarily the northeast region of the province is unsurprising given the widespread fire activity of this past season and ongoing drought conditions. As the snow melts and the air becomes drier with moderate winds, there is the potential for increased fire activity. Personnel continue to closely monitor holdover fires and establish response priorities as conditions allow. 

Bloomberg:

As skiers glide down the slopes of British Columbia’s Whistler Mountain and ice fishers drop their lines into frozen lakes in Alberta, dozens of the fires whose smoke darkened North America’s skies last year are still burning — with some smoldering beneath layers of snow. 

These so-called “zombie fires” are a sign of a grim new normal that’s wreaking havoc even in far northern countries like Canada: a fire season that almost never ends.

The western province of BC had 90 zombie blazes still burning as of mid-March, holdovers from last year’s record fire season, while neighboring Alberta started the year with 64 fires carried over from 2023 — more than 10 times the five-year average. As spring temperatures melt snow and uncover land parched by drought, those fires and new ones are poised to flare up, posing a fresh threat to Canada’s forests, not to mention the world’s atmosphere.

“We really don’t get out of wildfire season like we have historically,” said Rob de Pruis, director of consumer and industry relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. “They’re a real and present danger, and wildfires are happening right now.”

The worst fire season on record in Canada made global headlines last year when smoke from the blazes blotted out the skies above New York and other US cities, spawned a rare pyro-tornado and forced the evacuations of an estimated 232,000 people. The fires burned an area that was more than seven times the historic average — or about 4% of the country’s forests, according to a new study. 

The flames caused more than C$1 billion ($740 million) in insured damages, according to the insurance bureau. They also may have released emissions that are more than twice the annual carbon output of the nation’s economy, a top government scientist has estimated. 

This year, with 71% of Canada abnormally dry or in drought in February and swathes of the country as much as 5C (9F) warmer than normal, governments and companies are bracing for a repeat. Alberta declared a start to its wildfire season on Feb. 20 — the earliest in recent years — and a spokesman for Quebec’s forest-protection agency said the province’s season is poised to start as much as four weeks earlier than usual. 

Nationally, the federal government has invested C$170 million in a satellite mission to monitor fires, while the armed forces are training more soldiers as support firefighters.

British Columbia’s provincial government created a permanent Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness in 2022 — the year after the town of Lytton burned to the ground in a record-breaking heatwave — to deal with the onslaught of fires and floods. That replaces the previous approach, where resources were mobilized temporarily in response to events. “I exist in a state of anxiety on behalf of the province,” the department’s minister, Bowinn Ma, said in a phone interview. “It has become apparent that that kind of response-focused model just wasn’t sufficient.”

The province is upgrading firefighting equipment, working to get more access to aircraft, testing night-vision technology to extend fire suppression into the hours of darkness and looking at how to use artificial intelligence to predict fires. 

The province’s wildfire service also is shifting to operating year-round — rather than seasonally — and has increased its full-time staff more than 50% since 2022. British Columbia plans to almost triple the number of prescribed and cultural forest burns to pre-empt and curb wildfires this year: 61 are planned.
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Perhaps no industry has been more affected by fires in the past decade than Canada’s oil and gas sector, which was forced to shut down more than 1 million barrels of daily output during a devastating blaze in 2016. The fire razed sections of Fort McMurray — the largest city near most producers’ oil-sands operations — and caused about C$3.7 billion in insured losses, making it Canada’s costliest natural disaster.

During last year’s fire season, energy producers including Chevron Corp., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and Baytex Energy Corp. at times shut production equivalent to about 300,000 barrels of oil a day as blazes encroached on wells and processing infrastructure.

The drought conditions that are spawning the fires can also hurt producers by cutting off the water they need for operating oil-sands mines and wells. 

The Alberta Energy Regulator in December warned energy companies to “plan accordingly” when applying for licenses to divert water from rivers and to prepare contingency plans. Average monthly precipitation from October to the end of February was the lowest in at least 10 years in five of Alberta’s production areas, including near Lac La Biche, Fort McMurray, Slave Lake, Peace River and Grande Prairie.

Phys.org:

Wildfires are events that can have significant impacts on ecosystems and human society. In the context of global warming, there has been a notable surge in the frequency and ferocity of wildfires in the Northern Hemisphere over recent years. In 2023, Canada experienced an unprecedented wildfire event, with CO₂ emissions increasing by 527.1% over the average of 2001–2022 during the months of May–August.

The burned area was more than 6–7 times larger than in a normal year. Notably, both Canada and more than 15 states in the northeastern United States grappled with severe disruption to air quality as a result of this cataclysmic event.

The research group of Prof. Xu Yue from Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, China, investigated the meteorological factors that ignited this catastrophic event while also deliberating on the prospective triggers and ramifications of wildfires in North America. The results have recently been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

According to this research, a noteworthy correlation between the occurrence of severe wildfires and anomalies in maximum temperatures was revealed.

“During periods of high wildfire emissions, maximum temperatures were significantly higher than in periods with low emissions. Conversely, the average precipitation during periods of high wildfire emissions did not exhibit a statistically significant departure from that during periods of low wildfire emissions. Additionally, the phenomenon of ‘rain and wildfires at the same time’ was observed,” explains Prof. Yue.

Further investigations identified notable high-temperature anomalies within the primary burn area during the 2023 Canadian wildfire eruption period. This occurrence coincided with the enduring presence of anomalous high-pressure systems over the region attributable to Rossby wave dispersion. The persistent downdraft resulted in a sustained elevation of near-surface temperatures, thereby fostering conditions conducive to wildfire.

A similar “phase-locked” phenomenon of persistent geopotential height anomalies also emerged as the principal catalyst behind the unprecedented heat wave event in North America in 2021.

“Owing to the distinctive topographical features of the Rocky Mountains, phase-locked related heat is more prone to occur in west-central Canada, consequently heightening the risk of intensified wildfire events,” adds Prof. Yue.