Climate change supercharged a heat dome, intensifying 2021 fire season, study finds
As a massive heat dome lingered over the Pacific Northwest three years ago, swaths of North America simmered—and then burned. Wildfires charred more than 18.5 million acres across the continent, with the most land burned in Canada and California.
A new study has revealed the extent to which human-caused climate change intensified the extraordinary event, with researchers theorizing the heat dome was 34% larger and lasted nearly 60% longer than it would have in the absence of global warming. The heat dome, in turn, was associated with up to a third of the area burned in North America that year, according to the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment.
“What happens is you get a stagnated weather pattern—it’s very hot and very dry,” said study author Piyush Jain, research scientist with Natural Resources Canada. “And it dries out all the vegetation and makes whatever is on the ground extremely flammable.”
The study adds to a body of literature documenting how the fingerprints of climate change can be detected in events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires.
Jain was living in Edmonton in late June 2021 when the mercury in North America’s northernmost million-resident city topped 100 degrees. “I was blown away,” he said. “I’d never experienced those temperatures anywhere I’d lived.”
Farther south, the town of Lytton, British Columbia, on June 29 experienced Canada’s hottest recorded temperature, 119 degrees, and was largely destroyed by a wildfire the next day..
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