After our adventures in Quebec and Greenland, it was now time for our last stop in this intense season of fieldwork.
After our adventures in Quebec and Greenland, it was now time for our last stop in this intense season of fieldwork. This time we were heading to the Canadian Northwest Territories (NWT). Extraordinary wildfire seasons have become a regular occurrence in the NWT. The territory’s 10-year average for the total number of fires was exceeded in 2022, with nearly 600,000 hectares burned in 256 fires. At the time, that was more than any year since the outlier season of 2014. This may seem like a lot, but 2023 was brutal and far more exceptional.
The 2023 record fire season totaled around 3.6 million hectares burned by 303 fires. About 70 percent of the territory’s population, including the capital Yellowknife, was evacuated in the summer of 2023. The current Canadian fire season is also shaping up to be one of the most extreme in the last two decades. These extreme fire seasons have a significant impact on carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In response, our goal for this campaign was to obtain critical field observations to better estimate these emissions, so we packed our bags one last time for this summer and traveled as far north as Inuvik to begin our final data collections.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Photo Credit: Lipponen via Pixabay
