Revisiting the summer of 2004, which was haunted by relentless wildfires in Interior Alaska

Up to date: 20 minutes in the past Revealed: 20 minutes in the past

In a stunning heat Might this yr, now we have not but sniffed the bitter scent of flaming spruce. After we do, a few of us will suppose again to a yr that also haunts us.

In summer time 2004, a Vermont-sized patch of Alaska burned in wildfires. That hazy summer time was probably the most excessive fireplace yr within the half-century folks have stored rating.

Right here’s the way it occurred.

Might 2004 was hotter than common in Inside Alaska, floor zero for Alaska’s fires for 2 causes: Its summer time warmth and abundance of black spruce, which a firefighter as soon as described as “gasoline on a stick.”

However that Might was additionally wetter. Fairbanks acquired 2 inches of rain, greater than thrice regular.

The primary trace of one thing uncommon got here Might 31. On that day, the Alaska Lightning Detection System recorded 7,876 lightning strikes. Peppered from the Kobuk River to the higher Yukon, the lightning was the best complete ever recorded for a single day in Might.

All that lightning meant thunderstorms. The rain that got here with them maybe hid among the fires that began that day, wrote Michael Richmond, previously of the Nationwide Climate Service in Fairbanks, in a paper about that extraordinary summer time.

June was a heat month all through Alaska. For instance: Kivalina registered a temperature of 96 levels Fahrenheit on June 29. The conventional excessive for Kivalina, means north of the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Beach, is within the low 50s. Temperatures within the Inside have been 6 to 10 levels increased than the June common.

In late June and early July got here an uncommon 5 days of dry winds wheezing from the Brooks Vary and the uplands of the Yukon River. The fires, born of lightning strikes in Might and June, “have been fanned into conflagrations,” Richmond wrote.

Fairbanks was then within the soup. Large fires burned in all compass instructions. The solar was an orange disc you could possibly take a look at with out destroying your eyes. Visibility dropped to lower than one quarter mile. Folks seemed for areas on Alaska’s street system the place they might escape for a smokeless weekend, with no luck. It was scorching, however may have been hotter — the haze was so thick it scattered the solar’s rays.

“Excessive temperatures have been usually 10 to twenty levels (Fahrenheit) cooler than they’d have been underneath clear sky circumstances,” Richmond wrote.

The firestorm of 2004 continued with a file 9,022 lightning strikes July 15. That summer time’s complete of 147,642 lightning strikes was greater than twice the variety of every other yr.

And it didn’t finish in July. August is normally a moist month in Inside Alaska, when a change within the jet stream shoves moisture from the southwest between the Alaska Vary and Kuskokwim Mountains. That mechanism appeared damaged in 2004. Fairbanks had its driest August in additional than a century of information. It rained three-tenths of an inch on the primary day of the month, however not a drop for the following 30 days.

Fires burned nicely into September that yr. By the tip of the 2004 fireplace season, 6.2 million acres of Alaska had burned. That broke the previous Alaska file set in 1957, and never by a bit. The 1 million extra acres that burned in 2004 than in 1957 equates to a fireplace scar the dimensions of Rhode Island.