Capturing of data captures hot spots and burned acres show the season of Canada Forest Fire at wild start -ups
While forest fire images capture their ferocity, the data can give an overview of the severity of a fire season.
This is the case with two graphics, powered by satellite data, which highlight a Canadian season of forest fires for a wild – and scary – start -up -.
Twice a day, a satellite from NASA sends images to the ground, giving a real -time view of the place where the fires burn. This is particularly useful for distant areas where no sensor is parked.
On Tuesday, this satellite had resumed four times more hot spots of fire across Canada than typical in early June. It is more than any year since the satellite began to transmit in 2012, except 2023, according to data from Global Forest Watch.
Although the satellite has recorded thousands of hot spots so far this year, this does not mean that there are in fact so many active fires. Each hot spot could be detected several times over the days. And because each detection is the size of 26 football fields, it can represent part of a much larger fire, said James MacCarthy, director of research on forest fires at Global Forest Watch.
Based on the data from the Canadian Inter -Deady Forest Fire Center, around 200 fires are actively burning in Canada and consumed around 7,700 square miles (19,900 square kilometers), most of them last week.
Only 2023 saw figures so high so early in the Canada fire season, which takes place from April to October. That year, forest fires burned a record of 67,000 square miles – more than double the surface of the upper lake, the largest of the big lakes.
Overall, hot spots and hectares burned in 2025 have been the second start to the season for years.
“A hot and dry finish in May and early June created an important fire season,” said Liam Buchart, a Canadian forest service fire specialist.
The weather conditions are made more likely by climate change and encourage forest fires to start. This means that even if 90% of Manitoba forest fires this year were caused by humans, according to the provincial government, climate change helps to allow their spread.
“Climate change creates the conditions that make it more likely that the fires caused by humans will spread, or even start,” said MacCarthy. “It may be a human who begins, but he will spread quickly because now there are hot and dry conditions that occur more frequently and more intensely than they have done in the past.”
The warm and dry weather is likely to continue for at least next week from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, according to Natural Resources Canada. The agency forecasts also require “hot and drier than normal in July and August for large parts of Canada,” said Buchart.
“The rest of the fire season seems to stay above normal, especially in the northern meadows provinces and southern British Columbia,” he said.
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