ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska residents endure the nation’s harshest winters for the reward of beautiful summer days with sunshine that lingers until midnight.
But increasingly, large wildfires have marred the pristine outdoors, filling the skies with black smoke and forcing people who live near forests to flee for safety.
A study released Wednesday reinforces a trend revealed by state records, showing that wildfires have been blistering Alaska with greater frequency and intensity.
The findings have left forest managers and climate scientists to try to explain why and predict what’s next. “Fire seasons seem to be starting earlier and lasting longer,” said Tim Mowry, a state Division of Forestry spokesman.
A common factor associated with the increase — which doesn’t bode well for 2015 or beyond — is warm weather, even if experts don’t explicitly blame climate change.
Temperatures climbed 20 degrees above normal to the mid-80s last week in Anchorage, currently situated between a pair of active blazes that have charred dozens of homes and buildings.
Warm weather in early summer has a strong correlation with the number of square miles that eventually burn, climate expert Scott Rupp said. But it’s too soon to blame global warming. “We don’t have that understanding or the data that allows us to make those relationship connections,” Rupp said.
Still, climate models predict heat-trapping, greenhouse gasses will lead to warmer Alaska summers. “They’re all consistently trending up,” Rupp said.
Records on Alaska wildfires date to 1939 and show that three of the worst fire seasons have come in the last 12 years, including 2004, when more than 10,000 square miles — about 6.5 million acres, or the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined — went up in flames.
Hundreds of fires are dotting the state even now, including a growing blaze of about 1 square mile near the Yukon River village of Nulato. Thick smoke has made air evacuations impossible, forcing some in the small Athabascan Alaska Native community to evacuate by boat, 36 miles to the nearest town. Another fire in the state’s interior has led a dog sled racing champion to evacuate his animals along with some of the people in the remote community of Eureka.
The blazes come as a new study from Climate Central, a group of scientists and journalists who research climate change, indicates that the number of large Alaska wildfires have nearly doubled in the 1990s and 2000s compared to the ’50s and ’60s.
The analysis wasn’t a cause-and-effect study, but it notes Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country in the last 60 years.
So far this season, more than 500 square miles have been scorched, drawing in dozens of crews.
