Cooler weather, ‘near-normal’ precipitation prompts improved Alberta wildfire forecast

Officials say cold and snow over the winter could potentially lessen the upcoming fire season. Nicole Weisberg has the details.

Alberta’s wildfire outlook: better.

Much better, if the number of fires burning in the province as the calendar turned to 2025 compared to a year ago means anything.

Alberta is starting the wildfire season “in a much better position” than in 2024, provincial wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker told media Thursday: just six fires burned as December turned to January compared to 64 a year before.

• Download our app to get Edmonton alerts on your device

She said this year’s snowfall, cooler conditions and the potential for La Niña -- a natural climate pattern that affects the Pacific Ocean and generally results in colder temperatures and more precipitation -- over the next few months should translate into fewer wildfires.

“I think low temperatures and rain is going to be very welcome by firefighters,” Tucker said Thursday at a media tour of the provincial wildfire coordination centre in Edmonton.

Still, modelling data shows some parts of the province will be at a higher risk for fire than others, something Tucker said the centre is monitoring closely.

“It gives us an opportunity to pre-position some of our resources,” she said.

“If everything else in the province is as expected, with a little more precipitation, we have the freedom to move the crews around to where we’re going to need them and be able to respond quickly when we have a new start.”

Cory Davis, Alberta’s director of wildfire predictive services, said areas of concern that have had below-average precipitation include the Fort Chipewyan area in the northeast and the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, but that most of the province’s forested areas are near-normal for temperature this winter and near-to above-normal for precipitation, “which is more critical for what our season hazard is going to look like.”

“What we want to look out for, though, is we’re only in February, so we still have March and April before May conditions become an issue,” Davis said.

“Within those couple months, we can still see some fairly significant snowfalls. Snow arriving atthis early time of the year generally contains more moisture ... so these conditions can change quite a bit.”

March 1 is the official start of ‘wildfire season’ in Alberta, the earliest in Canada, Tucker said, “because of those spring conditions that we see.”

“Once the snow melts here in Alberta and the moisture evaporates, you have a lot of dead, dry grass (and) dead, dry trees,” she said. “That increases the hazards that there’s a chance that you’ll have a large-scale wildfire.”

Davis said the conditions right now “aren’t subject to a 2023 or 2024 season, where we were looking at extreme droughts or extreme hazard.”

“The fires' numbers will still fluctuate as we still (get) new fires even in the conditions we’re currently in, but they’re a much more manageable, much lower number than what we have had,” he said.

The province responded to more than 1,210 wildfires last year, burning more than 705,000 hectares, an area about 11 times the size of Edmonton.

In 2023, 1,080 wildfires burned in Alberta, affecting more than 2.2 million hectares, about 35 times the size of the city.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nicole Wesiberg and Miriam Valdes-Carletti