NYT: See Where Australia’s Deadly Wildfires Are Burning

New York Times - Nadja Popovich | Denise Lu | Blacki Migliozzi

Days into the New Year, deadly wildfires, fueled by wind and scorching summer heat, continued to rage across Australia’s southeast.

Source: NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System. Data as of January 3.

Thousands of tourists and residents have been forced to evacuate from areas along the southeast coast so far, and tens of thousands more are fleeing to safer ground ahead of the weekend, with forecasters predicting a new round of dangerous fire conditions.
High winds and temperatures reaching close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 38 Celsius, are expected starting Friday.
Australia’s 2019 fire season started early and has been exceptionally brutal, experts say, even for a country used to regular burning.
Wildfires have scorched millions of acres of land across the country since October, destroying more than a thousand homes and killing at least 19 people, including three volunteer firefighters.
The most-affected state, New South Wales, which includes Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is having its worst fire season in 20 years.

Source: Cumulative sum based on NASA Terra and Aqua satellite data.

This chart was created using data from two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, which can detect the infrared radiation emitted by fires.
The last time New South Wales saw a similarly large area burn was in 1974, but those fires were in more remote areas, Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, told The Guardian.
A spokeswoman for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service called the scale of the fires “unprecedented” so early in the season.

Source: Maxar Technologies, via Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. Note: Map colors are a visualization based on sensor data.

Why Is This Year’s Fire Season So Brutal?
A combination of record-breaking heat, drought and high wind conditions have dramatically amplified the recent fire season in Australia.
This week, government records confirmed that 2019 was the country’s hottest and driest year on record:

Source: Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology

The last month of 2019 saw particularly low rainfall, and the country recorded its hottest day yet.
The combination of extremely dry and extremely hot conditions adds up to more powerful fires, said Crystal A. Kolden, a wildfire researcher at the University of Idaho.
“When the vegetation is just dry, it will burn,” she said. “But when you add this extreme heat, it magnifies the effect allowing it to burn that much more intensely.”

Source: Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to assess major research on global warming and related climate impacts, found that the number of days with high-risk fire weather are expected to increase across southern Australia as the world warms.
This year’s early and intense fire season is “a harbinger of what is to come,” Dr. Kolden said, and a “strong indicator” that some of the effects of climate change are already here.

Links

• Bushfire response to be boosted by deployment of 3,000 ADF reservists, Prime Minister announces
• Millions of Australians Are Choking on Smoke From Wildfires
• Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented?
• Australia's bushfire crisis is so big that it's useless trying to predict how blazes will behave, incident controller says
• NZ skies turn orange as a result of Australia's bushfires
• Australia's climate policies will protect environment and 'seek to reduce' hazard of fires, says Prime Minister
• Thousands seek shelter from bushfires