Why haven’t we seen as much wildfire smoke as we did last year?

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — During the summer of 2023, Rochester and much of the east coast of North America was bathed in wildfire smoke and saw huge reductions in air quality on multiple occasions. This year outside of some hazy skies and some light air quality issues only affecting those most sensitive to it, there thankfully hasn’t been very much.

The short answer as to why there hasn’t been as many issues with smoke in our region this year is that there just aren’t very many wildfires near us and a little bit of luck with our weather patterns.

Through 2024 Canadian wildfires this year have primarily been found into Saskatchewan, Alberta, and into British Columbia in Western Canada. On the United States side, wildfires have primarily been concentrated in Washington, Oregon and into California again all mostly on the other side of the country from us here in Western New York.

A driving, but not the only factor, of this years quieter Eastern Canada fire season is the lack of drought being found across Quebec and Ontario provinces. Conversely, out in Western Canada, drought has persisted not just from last year but across several years much like in the Western United States as well. While drought doesn’t always equal increased wildfire activity it doesn’t help very much either, and the issues derived from drought can be influenced by other short term factors lessening or worsening fire risk. These include human activity through which many wildfires are started, and short term weather patterns such as recent precipitation (rain or snow) which can lower the fire risk for an area, and lightning which can cause a wildfire to begin. In fact, according to previous reporting by News 8 approximately half of all wildfires in Canada were started by lightning strikes, accounting for 93% of the land area burned last year.

Ultimately, there is still plenty of summer and fire season to go across the entirety of North America, and all it takes is a shift in the flow of the upper atmosphere to move smoke from the west back over our region. We’ll continue to monitor the situation as the year progresses in the News 8 Weather Center so stay tuned with us for the latest.

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