for National Geographic News
Cold weather brought rain and snow to the Northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest this week, giving firefighters in Montana, Washington, and Oregon some much-needed relief from an ongoing wildfire season that is headed for the record books.
(See map of the United States.)
Since January, when early wildfires swept across Texas and Oklahoma, more than 8.8 million acres (3.5 million hectares) of forest and grasslands have been scorched in the western United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).
That's an area twice the size of New Jersey.
The amount of acreage burned tops any since 1960, when officials started collecting reliable tallies of fire damage, and is far higher than the ten-year average of 4.9 million acres (1.9 million hectares) a year.
"We had a lot of large fires this year," said Rose Davis, spokesperson for the NIFC in Boise, Idaho.
"We had drought conditions and, up to this weekend, we didn't get a lot of breaks as far as the weather goes."
At one point, firefighting resources were stretched so thin that U.S. officials enlisted the help of nearly a hundred firefighters from Australia and New Zealand.
Canadian firefighters also helped along the U.S.-Canada border, where planes dropped fire-retardant slurry on the flames.
More Fires May Be the Norm
A pair of new studies suggests that huge wildfire seasons like this year's may become the norm in the western United States, as global temperatures continue to climb and the drought conditions that have turned the region into a virtual tinderbox worsen.
"The western United States is getting warmer," said Thomas Swetnam, professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona in Tucson and co-author of a study published last month in the journal Science.
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