The fast-moving Dove Fire near a Yosemite gateway town jolted California out of a relatively quiet fire summer, forcing road closures and the evacuations of hundreds of homes.
Former U.S. Forest Service firefighter John Buckley wasn’t surprised to see the fire taking off last Sunday. Driving through the area in the Central Sierra foothills earlier that day, he remembers telling his wife those fuels looked ready to burn.
“We drive back, and they’re burning over at the city of Sonora,” said Buckley, now the executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “The fuels are now quite primed for burning, and they’re only going to get drier.”
Firefighters have gained the upper hand against the 226-acre blaze, which Cal Fire suspects was set by a reckless 30-year-old man. But high temperatures are looming — and new research puts numbers to the intuitive follow-on: with heat, comes fire.
It’s far too early in California’s fire year to make any conclusions or predictions. But with fires devouring millions of acres in the Western U.S., Canada, and Europe, California stands out for what has been, so far, a below-average summer.
To date, roughly 4,030 wildfires have burned a little over 208,000 acres in the state — down from a five-year average of nearly 5,300 fires burning more than 300,000 acres at this point, according to Cal Fire data.
Still, Cal Fire Battalion Chief David Acuña says he avoids the word ‘quiet.’
“There is a superstition that when you use words like ‘quiet, slow, bored’ in the fire station, that just means that you’re about to get hit with an amazingly busy shift,” he said.
California has benefited from lucky weather conditions so far, despite a low snowpack and blistering March, according to John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced.
That’s about to change. “Now, of course,” he said, “we have a heat wave on our doorstep.”
National Weather Service offices across the state are warning of soaring temperatures starting later this week. The Los Angeles/Oxnard office said conditions will shift to “dangerously hot” by Friday.
That combination — heat waves and fire activity — is a common feature of western wildfires, Abatzoglou’s team found in a recent study published in the journal Science Advances and led by scientist Dmitri Kalashnikov.
The paper found that just under half of the burned area in warm-season months from 2001 to 2024 occurred during or in the wake of a heatwave, particularly in forests.
Heatwaves, defined as at least three days in a row with temperatures soaring past the 90th percentile, make up 15% or less of the warm season. But climate change is fueling an increase.
Abatzoglou pointed to a few reasons for the link. Heatwaves create chronic conditions that lead to drier, more flammable fuels. They also mean hotter nights, which previous research found increases nighttime fire intensity, shuttering a critical window for fire suppression. The researchers found that heatwaves can also prime conditions for lightning, which has sparked some of California’s biggest blazes.
“And then it’s off to the races in terms of fire activity,” Abatzoglou said.
The paper’s findings don’t mean all heatwaves will bring an uptick in fire activity, he added. That still requires ignitions in the right place, at the right time.
Acuña cautioned Californians against creating those sparks. That means mowing before 10 a.m. on hot days or skipping the yard work during a red flag warning. It also means securing tow chains so they don’t drag and spark against the road, and not parking hot cars on dry grass.
California sought and received federal funding assistance related to the Dove Fire within hours. But a separate, monthslong fight between Sacramento and Washington continues over slower-moving wildfire recovery funds — including hundreds of millions in aid tied to last year’s L.A. fires that Gov. Gavin Newsom said in May FEMA was still sitting on.
As for predictions for the season ahead, Acuña likes to make them about as much as he likes the word ‘quiet.’
“It depends on what the weather brings us,” he said. “If it brings us hot, windy, red flag warning conditions, then that could certainly be a problem. If it brings us rain, well, that brings us a totally different concern. We are ready to respond.”