It has been a harrowing equation out West over the past few months:

Abundant fuel + hot temperatures + winds = large, fast-moving wildfires.

At one point San Francisco was bathed in an eerie orange glow that evoked comparisons to post-apocalyptic times. The Beachie Creek Fire in Oregon spread massively over a single night, from 500 acres to over 159,000 acres due to a windstorm with wind gusts as high as 50 miles per hour. People living in Portland, Oregon, were immersed in dense smoke with record poor air quality that on some days was listed as the worst air quality on Earth.

In 2020, wildfire activity in California and the Pacific Northwest has been extreme, with more than 45,700 wildfires raging across 8.3 million acres (as of October 15, 2020). This puts the 2020 Fire Year on pace for being the most extensive of the last decade, even outpacing the fires of 2017 and 2018.

Fire science underlies all the training and tools used by firefighters today. Fire science is also critical for understanding the complex and changing situations encountered by communities and land managers, finding ways to address the rising wildfire risk to save lives, property, our wildlands and money.

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