News

Both sides of the Pacific facing wildfire at the same time

It had to happen, where once it was a clear demarcation between wildfire seasons on the east coast of Australia and the West Coast of the USA, they are now overlapping. It is only the start of the fire season in California and they have just contained a 300,000 acre with summer on the horizon and the El Nino storms offering some but relatively little reprieve for many parts of California, the drought is causing “perfectly terrible” conditions for forest fires to once again rear their ugly heads.

In Australia the abnormal heat is hardly a one-month wonder. The October-March period in Sydney has been two degrees warmer than average for maximum temperatures, making it the hottest such period in more than 150 years of records. Nationally, last month was the hottest March for mean temperatures, eclipsing the previous record set in 1986. Those conditions have prompted the Rural Fire Service to extend for another month the bushfire season in a most districts.

Image courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture