zombie fires
Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/22/siberia-heat-wave/
Russian officials have stated they expect the summer will potentially be the hottest the region has seen, with an unusually destructive fire season. Fires in the vast forests of Siberia burned 7 million acres last year, an area larger than the state of Maryland, and sent smoke drifting around the world.
This year, 1.5 million acres have burned. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, England, said via email that fire-related emissions around the Arctic Circle and Siberia’s Sakha Republic have not exceeded average data from 2003 through 2019.
However, Labe said t
here have been trends of fires showing up shortly after snow cover melts, which is a topic of discussion in the fire science community. Some scientists are noting how quickly the hot spots are showing up on satellite imagery and questioning whether these are actually “zombie fires” from last summer that survived the winter by burning in layers of vegetation under the snow.