Canada fire weather outlook

Each week during the wildfire season, Dr. Mike Flannigan will share a five- to 10-day fire weather outlook for Canada. This is a first step in developing a national early warning system for wildfire in Canada. The fire weather outlook will be posted every Tuesday.

Mike Flannigan is the scientific director of the Institute for Wildfire Science, Adaptation, and Resiliency as well as the BC Innovation Research Chair in Predictive Services, Emergency Management and Fire Science at Thompson Rivers University.

View bio

Weekly Outlook | August 29- September 3, 2026 Issued August 25, 2026

All information provided below is reported at the time of publication and may not reflect more recent updates.

This week I have added a new section called Useful Websites. Each week I will highlight a website that serves as a valuable source of information. See the end of this outlook for the first recommendation.

Current fire situationNighttime burning

We have observed numerous fires in Ontario, BC (the Bald Range Fire), and more recently the Hawk Fire near Reno, Nevada, and the Ross Fire in Texas burn actively into or through the night (Figure 1). Over the past 30 years, I have used satellite imagery throughout the fire season to monitor the day-to-day fire and weather situation in Canada and beyond. In recent years, I have noticed that more fires are burning into, and sometimes, through the night. This increase in nighttime burning is associated with growing drought conditions and warmer, drier nights. Active daytime burning is often a precursor to active nighttime burning, and we are seeing more active fires during the day as well. Fire management agencies are responding to this shift in nighttime fire behaviour by actively fighting fire at night. For those interested in this topic, I would suggest the following papers; Balch et al. 2022; Freeborn et al. 2022; Luo et al. 2024 and 2026 (see references below).

Figure 1. GOES- East 3.9-micron imagery loop from the night of August 24th-25th, 2026. White areas indicate active or intense fires and red areas indicate very active or intense fires.

Fire weather outlook August 29- September 3, 2026

Fire activity in southern BC and parts of the NWT continues to be of concern, with 56 out-of-control fires in BC and over 200 out-of-control fires, many of which are monitored as out-of-control wildfires in the NWT (Figure 2). Some relief is expected for BC during the outlook period, as an upper-low moves through southern BC this weekend (August 29th – 30th, Figure 3), bringing cooler temperatures and some rainfall without the lightning observed last weekend. The upper-air pattern is non-stationary, with a stream of ridges and troughs moving across Canada through the outlook period. This translates to most of Canada receiving some rainfall during the outlook period. Bottom line, a relatively quiet outlook period is expected for Canada. While the rainfall will not extinguish the active fires, it will substantially inhibit fire growth.

Figure 2: Map of Canada showing the location and status of wildfires as of August 25th, 2026. Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre Inc. (CIFFC)

Figure 3. ECMWF 500mb heights and anomalies for August 29th, 2026.

Useful Websites

Before the internet, weather maps were distributed by facsimile. I still recall hovering over the facsimile machine at the University of Waterloo, watching the 12Z January 26,1978 surface map come through (Figure 4), showing a 960 mb low near Detroit/Windsor, a storm that produced the lowest recorded surface pressure (956 mb) in the continental United States outside of tropical systems. I promptly went home as the blizzard conditions arrived. Highway 401 was closed and my wife was stuck at work overnight. As a weather forecaster with the Atmospheric Environment Service, we continued to rely on facsimile maps for a number of years. Today, a wealth of information is available at our fingertips.

The first site I will recommend is pivotal weather pivotalweather.com, which I have referenced in figures throughout this outlook. A guide to the animations on this site is available at Map Animations — Pivotal Weather. Numerous other sites offer similar information that people use, including windy.com and weather.cod.edu, among others. If you have an interest in weather, I encourage you to explore the various sites and use the one that is the best fit for you.

Figure 4. Surface weather map for North America, 12Z January 26th, 1978. WPC North American surface analysis zoom, pan, animation and archives

References

Balch, J. K. et al. 2022.Warming weakens the night-time barrier to global fire. Nature 602,442–448
Freeborn, P. H., Jolly, W. M., Cochrane, M. A. & Roberts, G. 2022. Large wildfire driven increasesin nighttime fire activity observed across CONUS from 2003–2020. Remote Sens. Environ.268, 112777
Luo, K., Wang, X., de Jong, M., Flannigan, M. 2024. Drought triggers and sustains overnight fires in North America. Nature 627, 321–327. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07028-5
Luo, K., Wang, X., Castellanos-Acuna, D., and Flannigan, M. 2026. A weakened diurnal weather cycle leads to longer burning hours in North America. Science Advances. 12,eaed0725. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed0725