The air you can see · The year the data got loud

At every date with published figures, 2026 was well below 2025. On 9 July, when 1.4 million hectares had burned in 2026, the figure for the same date in 2025 was 4,614,713 hectares.

The smoke travelled. More than 120 million people in the US Midwest and Northeast were affected by dangerous air quality, WWA reports, with alerts from Minnesota to New Hampshire.

WWA studied fire weather: the hot, dry, windy conditions that let fires spread. It did not study the area burned. In the Northwest Territories it found that climate change made the peak 7-day fire weather about 5 times as likely, at today's 1.4 °C of global warming. In Ontario its combined estimate is about 2 times.