The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track global extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Study Finds Global Increase in Hot, Dry Days Ideal for Wildfires
Dear Diary. Yesterday we delved into the first major U.S. climate crisis item for 2026, which was wildfires breaking out across portions of the Plains. Obviously, the fires were caused by record warmth over most of the winter as well as very dry weather. Warm dry weather caused extensive wildfire damage across Canada the last couple of years. Scientifically I don’t think that this has to be proven, but this week the Guardian has written an article that indeed there was an effort to do so. Nevertheless, this study was important because it showed wildfire trends from various regions around our planet.
Here are details:
Study finds global increase in hot, dry days ideal for wildfires | Climate crisis | The Guardian
Study finds global increase in hot, dry days ideal for wildfires
Dangerous days have nearly tripled in past 45 years – and increase largely driven by human-made warming
Firefighters battle the Eaton fire in Pasadena in January last year. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
Associated Press 18 Feb 2026
The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.
And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.
What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to wildfires because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke.
Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires, and help will not be as likely to come from neighbors busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.
In 1979 and for the next 15 years, the world averaged 22 synchronous fire weather days a year for flames that stayed within large global regions, the study found. In 2023 and 2024, it was up to more than 60 days a year.
“These sorts of changes that we have seen increase the likelihood in a lot of areas that there will be fires that are going to be very challenging to suppress,” said study co-author John Abatzoglou, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced.
The researchers did not look at fires but weather conditions: warm, with strong winds and dry air and ground.
“It increases the likelihood of widespread fire outbreaks, but the weather is one dimension,” said study lead author Cong Yin, a fire researcher at University of California, Merced. The other big ingredients to fires are oxygen, fuel such as trees and brush, and ignition such as lightning or arson or human accidents.
This study is important because extreme fire weather is the primary – but not only – factor in increasing fire impacts across the globe, said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Canada, who wasn’t part of the study. And it’s also important because regions that used to have fire seasons at different times and could share resources are now overlapping, he said.
Abatzoglou said: “And that’s where things begin to break.”
More than 60% of the global increase in synchronous fire weather days can be attributed to climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Yin said. He and his colleagues know this because they used computer simulations to compare what has happened in the past 45 years with a fictional world without the increased greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
The continental US, from 1979 to 1988, averaged 7.7 synchronous fire weather days a year. But in the last 10 years that average was up to 38 days a year, according to Yin.
But that is nothing compared to the southern half of South America. That region averaged 5.5 synchronous fire weather days a year from 1979 to 1988; over the last decade, that’s risen to 70.6 days a year, including 118 days in 2023.
Of 14 global regions, only south-east Asia saw a decrease in synchronous fire weather, probably because it is getting more humid there, Yin said.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)