Giving Compass' Take:

• Here are some images and charts depicting the severity of the California wildfires that hit mid-August and a prediction of what is to come. 

• How can data help inform disaster relief preparation?  

• Read more about disaster relief and recovery planning. 

The West is burning. Wildfires are spreading in every state west of the Rocky Mountains and there aren’t enough firefighters to extinguish them all. Firefighters from other countries, or from prisons, usually assist but they can’t this year, thanks to the COVID pandemic.

Fire tornados recently turned up at the California-Nevada border. Drought in the Pacific Northwest has authorities there spooked. California, Oregon, and Washington all declared states of emergency earlier this week … and fire season is just getting started.

Who knows what things will look like by the end of fire season, but the 2020 fires are already producing some scary images. Let’s take a look.

It’s been a dry year in much of the West. The monsoons that usually mark Arizona’s early summers were missing this year, leading to some of the biggest fires in the state’s history in July. In Colorado, the Pine Gulch Fire started at the end of the month, and has since become the second biggest fire recorded in that state. At that point, southern California was already in the thick of it.

A heatwave — likely exacerbated by climate change — blanketed western states in mid-August. That primed the tinder. Then came the electrical storms.

It always takes a little while to determine if climate change made any specific event worse — but it’s clear that the world is getting hotter, and the hotter things get, the more likely they are to burn. The world is changing before our eyes.

Read the full article about wildfires by Nathanael Johnson at Grist.