A ‘smoke storm’ swirls over North America, seen by the GOES-16 satellite on May 20, 2023. (Screenshot from RAMMB/CIRA Slider animation)
On May 20, 2023, the GOES-16 satellite acquired stunning images of what a climatologist described as a “smoke storm.”
It came as huge amounts of smoke billowing from wildfires that broke out in the western Canadian province of Alberta were sucked into a swirling low-pressure weather system in counterclockwise near the Canada-United States border. You can see it in the screenshot above and in this animation:
So far this year, some 500 forest fires burned more than 3,600 square miles of Alberta. This area is more than ten times the size of New York City.
The cause of most fires has not been determined. But as of May 20, 11 had been confirmed as caused by lightningand 17 of human origin.
Temperatures in Alberta were well above normal, and there was also a lot of wind – conditions that helped the fires spread. For example, on May 4, temperatures in Fort McMurray, in the north of the province, reached an all-time high. 90 degrees F, shattering the previous record of 20 degrees. The average maximum for that day is just 55 degrees F. Throughout the month, winds frequently gusted above 25 miles per hour, and at times well above 30.
Forest fires and climate change
Temperature increase, aridity and drought have extended fire seasons in a quarter of the world’s vegetation zones since 1979. Evidence also shows “that human-caused climate change has led to an increase in the area burned by wildfires in the forests of the world.” western North America, according to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“In this region, higher temperatures from human-induced climate change have doubled [the] area burned from 1984 to 2015, compared to what would have burned without climate change,” according to the IPCC report. The additional area burned is greater than the land area of Switzerland. In one particularly bad year in British Columbia, drought and high temperatures contributed to fires that burned seven to eleven times the area that would have burned without climate change.