“So with all of that and with the wind and access issues, it was just a recipe for disaster,” Yeun said. Overnight humidity is needed to restore some moisture to vegetation. And that increases the rapidity at which they will ignite and burn.”Īnother factor is the lack of overnight humidity, said Yeun of Cal Fire. Because fires basically burn more freely under high temperatures because the high temperatures drive the moisture out of the live fuel, and the dead fuels. In addition, “we’ve had a phenomena heat wave, and that heat wave is certainly a contributing factor. This year’s drought and an earlier drought in 2014 both killed plants that fuel fires, Keeley said. But “there’s reason to believe that global warming may have made them more severe,” said Jon Keeley, a research scientist at the U.S. The nation’s most populous state has had many droughts throughout history. “Then add more ignitions with human development across an increasingly fire-prone environment, and the net result is seeing records being surpassed repeatedly.” “So climate change is responsible both directly and probably indirectly,” Moritz said. “It’s widely agreed that anthropogenic climate change is the cause of increased temperatures, on average, and more extreme heat waves,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension.Īlthough there is less certainty about the cause of worsening droughts, he said in an email that “climate change is projected to result in more variable precipitation patterns (i.e., wetter wet periods and drier dry periods)” and “greater heating makes any given drought’s effects on plants that much worse (i.e., more flammable over a longer window of time).” 10, 2020).Įight of the 10 largest blazes in state history have occurred in the last five years, a fiery rampage seen by many scientists as a clear sign of climate change. That stunned climate scientists, who had predicted that kind of jump in wildfire damage wouldn’t occur for another 30 years or more ( Climatewire, Oct. California blazes blackened more than 4 million acres last year, easily surpassing the previous annual record of 2 million acres burned in 2018. Even worse conditions than last year.”īoth fires are part of a larger trend. “Last fire season was unprecedented,” Yeun said, “and we saw a lot of the same conditions in some parts of California. Dixie is burning in Butte, Tehama, Plumas, Shasta and Lassen counties. The two aren’t strictly comparable, because the August Complex merged several fires burning at the same time in the same general area. If Dixie becomes the state’s most destructive fire, it would dethrone the August Complex Fire, which burned more than 1 million acres last year.

So we’re confident that 59 percent of the fire is not going to spread, but that means we’ve still got a lot of work to do.” right now, as of today, it’s 59 percent contained. “We’re crossing our fingers,” Yeun said from the Dixie command center. Mike Yeun, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), acknowledged that the fire could overtake the huge blaze that set state records last year, but he said, “We’re hoping that it doesn’t.” It has burned more than 927,000 acres, and 41% of it is still blazing uncontrollably. The Dixie Fire is headed toward becoming the biggest blaze in California history as it devours mountainsides of brittle trees and shrubs caused by a yearslong drought and record heat.įirefighters have been battling the wildfire in the Sierra Nevada since mid-July.

Cal fire map of dixie fire