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 bioWeekly Outlook | July 4- July 9, 2026 Issued June 30, 2026
All information provided below is reported at the time of publication and may not reflect more recent updates.
Current fire situationCanada on fire
The Senate report, Canada on fire: The catastrophic and escalating effects of wildfires on lives and communities, came out a few weeks ago. Now, Canada is on fire with over 600 active fires, more than 500 of which are listed as out of control (Figures 1and 2: CIFFC | Home The CIFFC website is a great site to keep up to speed on the fire situation in Canada). The National Preparedness Level has moved to NPL3, meaning wildland fire activity is increasing within one or more jurisdictions.
Many of these recent fires are lightning-caused wildfires. Figure 3 shows a graph of fire cause by day of year for Canada (Coogan et al. 2020) and lightning-caused fires are now the dominant cause until the autumn. Lightning-caused fires are responsible for 55% of fire starts in Canada but account for 92% of the area burned during the 1980-2024 period (see Hanes et al. 2025).
Why are lightning-caused fires responsible for most of the area burned? First, many lightning-caused fires occur in remote areas where fires are not actioned and are allowed to grow (Monitored fires - see purple circles in Figure 1). Second, lightning and lightning-caused fires can occur in large clusters that can overwhelm a fire management agency resulting in out-of-control fires (red circles in Figure 1) some of which may grow large.
One additional challenge with lightning-caused fires is that these fires can hold over for days or even weeks. Typically lightning strikes a tree, often a conifer and travels down the bole to the base of the tree and the fire starts in a bed of needles, but if the needles are not dry, the fire can smoulder for a day or even weeks until the weather and fuel conditions are conducive. This means a lightning storm can pass through a region and some fires may arrive right away whereas others may not reach flaming combustion until many days later.
Figure 2. Breakdown of fire numbers, type and location in Canada, June 30, 2026.
Figure 3. Graph showing fire cause (humans and lightning) by day of the year for the 1959-2018 period.
Fire weather outlook July 4-9, 2026
A broad upper ridge centered over Hudson Bay covers much of eastern Canada on July 4 and 5. An upper low moves into Hudson Bay by the end of the period with ridges to the east and west of the low (Figure 4). The Hot Dry Windy Index (HDWI) shows conditions over the 95th percentile of climatology for northern Quebec (Figure 5). Expect fires to be very active in this region. I will take a closer look at the HDWI in the coming weeks. Also, expect active fire weather over much of Ontario, northern Manitoba, southeastern Nunavut, parts of the Northwest Territories (especially from Great Bear Lake north to the Arctic coast) and southern British Columbia.
Figure 4. ECMWF 500 mb heights and anomalies for July 8, 2026.
Figure 5. Hot Dry Windy Index showing the 75th, 90th and 95th percentiles for July 5 and July 6 across much of North America.HDW - Probabilities
A Look Ahead
It is a bit early to be confident, but a strong upper high builds over the Four Corners regions (SW USA) or a little further east over Colorado during July 10-15, with a broad upper ridge extending northward to BC and Alberta and then to the Beaufort Sea. This pattern is a typical summer pattern and is conducive to fire.
References – Note if you click on the links you can access the full paper (no paywall).
- Coogan, S.C. P., Cai , X., Jain, P. and Flannigan, M.D. 2020. Seasonality and trends in human- and lightning-caused wildfires ≥ 2 ha in Canada, 1959–2018. International Journal of Wildland Fire 29(6) 473-485 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF19129
- Hanes, C., Jain, P., Wang, W., Wang, X., Parisien, M-A., Little, J. and Flannigan, M. 2025. Trends in Canadian Wildfires: an update. Can. J. For. Res. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfr-2025-0209
Questions?We have the answers
Questions, including media requests for Mike Flannigan, can be emailed to wildfire@tru.ca.
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