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Canadian wildfire smoke reaches Europe as Canada reports its worst fire season on record

28 June 2023 13:50 (UTC +04:00)

Canada has officially marked its worst wildfire season on record, with smoke from the blazes crossing the Atlantic Ocean and reaching western Europe on Monday, APA reports citing CNN.

Canada has had a dramatic start to wildfire season, with at least 19,027,114 acres already charred across the country. Wildfire activity in Canada typically peaks from June to August, leaving more than half of the peak season still to come.

As a result of the unprecedented start to the wildfire season, this year has become the worst fire season on record, surpassing the previous benchmark set in 1989 for the total area burned. In 1989, at least 18,254,317 acres were burned in the country, according to fire statistics from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

And the smoke from the wildfires, which wrapped New York City in a cloud of smog earlier this month, has now reached as far as the United Kingdom, according to the UK Met Office.

The smoke that has made its way into Europe has done so via the jet stream – strong winds in the upper levels of the atmosphere. This means the smoke will not lead to dramatically worse surface air quality like the Northeast US experienced a few weeks ago.

“Whilst the smoke is high up in the atmosphere, it may make for some vivid sunrises and sunsets in the next few days,” the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, wrote on Twitter.

Forecast models show the smoke lingering in the upper levels of the atmosphere over Europe for much of this week.

CNN previously reported that smoke from the wildfires reached Norway at the start of June. Because the smoke is injected at high altitudes, it’s able to stay in the atmosphere longer and travel farther distances.