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.

When there aren’t enough resources to attack fires when they first start, blazes that might have otherwise been snuffed out when they were small grow large and difficult to contain, resulting in the need for yet more resources, said John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced who also worked on the study. If this type of synchronous activity persists in future years, it could force fire managers to reevaluate the reliability of resource-sharing arrangements, he said.

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