As Canada’s drought grows, rains keep dousing this fire-prone region
Wildfire statistics in both California and Canada reflect this year’s finicky rainfall patterns across North America
Los Angeles has seen more than 500 per cent of its normal rainfall so far this November, courtesy of a significant atmospheric river that chomped into what little drought remains across the state of California.
The state’s abundant rains are a rare bit of good news in a region still recovering from devastating fires earlier this year.
California’s reversal in atmospheric fortunes is a perfect example of the topsy-turvy patterns we’ve seen in communities across North America this year, which includes a growing drought throughout much of Canada.
DON’T MISS: Where's the precipitation? Alberta seeing its driest fall in 140 years
Atmospheric river chomps away at California’s drought
A major atmospheric river swept into the California coast last weekend, ushering in several days of heavy rainfall across most of the state’s diverse landscape.
Santa Barbara saw a whopping total of 271 mm of rainfall, securing a spot in the history books as the city’s wettest three-day stretch ever recorded in the month of November.
Los Angeles picked up 88 mm of rain during the event, pushing the downtown weather station’s monthly total to 112.3 mm through Nov. 21.
This represents more than 550 per cent of the city’s average rainfall during the month of November. Precipitation picks up during the autumn months in Los Angeles, where the traditional rainy season falls between December and February.
Drought conditions slipped away as a result of the widespread heavy rain. Drought covered 31.86 per cent of California in the Nov. 11 update of the U.S. Drought Monitor. That number fell 17 points to just 14.86 per cent the following week, a stunning improvement.
U.S. and Canada struggling with widespread drought
Even as drought-prone California sees rapid improvements, things aren’t going so well across the rest of North America.
Between Nov. 11 and Nov. 18, drought conditions actually grew by 2 per cent across the continental U.S. as a whole. Large swaths of the U.S. are enduring moderate to severe drought conditions to round out November.
Canada entered the month of November with 80 per cent of the country’s landscape mired in abnormally dry or full-on drought conditions. A particularly extreme drought covered the Maritimes, where the situation is serious enough that wells are running dry.
Drought patterns reflect in this year’s wildfire numbers
Drought and fire are inextricably linked, and we can easily see the effects of recent rainfall patterns in this year’s wildfire statistics.
California has only seen 212,544 hectares of land burned this year through Nov. 21, a significant reduction from its year-to-date average of 532,544 hectares, according to CAL FIRE.
Meanwhile, intense blazes across Canada have consumed just over 8,000,000 hectares of land through Nov. 21, per data collected by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. This is the second-highest area of land burned in Canada since the CIFFC’s records began in 1983.
Header image taken by the author at Yosemite National Park, California.