Regular rainfall results in quiet wildfire season in northwestern Ontario
The province has seen just over half the usual number of wildfires it typically sees by mid-August
While Western Canada struggles with a devestating wildfire season, including an out-of-control wildfire that has already destroyed part of Jasper, Alta., the number of wildfires across Ontario has been well below average, according to data from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF).
The province logged 273 fires between Jan. 1 and Aug. 12, 2024 with 141 of them occurring in northwestern Ontario. That's well below the 10-year average for the same time period of 576 fires, and less than half the number of fires in the province during the same period in 2023, when 615 fires had been recorded.
This year's fires have so far burned nearly 27,000 hectares of land – 7,667 in the northwest – compared to an annual average over the past 10 years of nearly 200,000 hectares of land during the same time period.
Rainfall well above 2021 levels
"We did come into this season … with extensive drought across a lot of the country, including parts of Ontario," said Chelene Hanes, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
"And we didn't get a lot of snow pack … And so there were folks that were worried. But what did happen in Ontario, which didn't necessarily happen in other parts of the country, is we got a lot of rain this spring."
Kenora received approximately 300 mm of rain between April 1, the start of wildfire season, and July 31 of this year, according to data from Environment and Climate Change Canada.
The area saw just over 185 mm of precipitation during the same time period in 2021, the year that multiple large fires forced evacuations from the town of Red Lake and several First Nations, including Pikangikum, Poplar Hill and Deer Lake.
The weather station at Ear Falls, approximately an hour south of Red Lake, recorded just over 436 mm of precipitation between Jan. 1 and July 31 of this year – including 150 mm in June alone. During the same period in 2021, it recorded just 196.2 mm.
"We cannot just depend on winter weather to determine if it is indeed a bad season," said Gerald Cheng, a meteorologist with the weather agency.
"We obviously have to give information in April because people are asking to prepare for a possible bad summer. But it also really depends what happens in the spring. And you can see the numbers from the spring that we had a lot of precipitation, so that really changed the course of what will be for northwestern Ontario."
Moisture levels in the fuel on Ontario's forest floors has been "pretty seasonal" this year, Hanes said.
Some pockets along the coast of Lake Superior are drier than the 30-year-averages for the area, she said. But they are not outside typical ranges.
"2021 was one of the busiest years that Ontario has seen since the '80s, and we saw drought values well above the 30 year maximums," she said.
"This year is a lot lower than that, particularly in the northwest. It's just we've been getting a lot of precipitation, and it's just keeping things wetter … which is good to prevent fires."
The slow fire season has meant that Ontario has been able to send resources out of province to help with fires in other parts of the country, according to Chris Marchand, a fire information officer with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry's Aviation Forest Fire and Emergency Services (AFFES).
Ontario currently has a 26-person incident management team deployed in Alberta to help with the busy wildland fire season there, Marchand said.
Since the start of the fire season on April 1, AFFES has sent 419 fire rangers and 150 overhead staff to help partner agencies, primarily in Western Canada.
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