Canada fire weather outlook

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.

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Weekly Outlook | August 22-27, 2026 Issued August 18, 2026

All information provided below is reported at the time of publication and may not reflect more recent updates.

Throughout this fire season, I have invited colleagues to contribute sections on wildfire-related topics to the outlook. This week, I am pleased to share a contribution on Wildfire Smoke and Mental Health by Dr. Soodeh Saberian, who recently joined Thompson Rivers University as the Canada Research Chair in Economics of Climate Change, Disasters and Inequality (see Counting the hidden costs of wildfire – TRU Newsroom). Dr. Saberian’s contribution appears in italics below.

Current fire situationWildfire Smoke and Mental Health in Canada

We usually think about wildfire and mental health in terms of smoke. And smoke matters, PM2.5 can travel hundreds of kilometres and it takes a toll on people's lungs, hearts, and minds. But in our work with Canadian hospital data, Janet Currie and I found that smoke isn't the only thing driving people to seek mental health care during a bad fire season.

Three other things matter too. Evacuation orders are stressful on their own, independent of the smoke. Just living near a fire, even without being evacuated, has costs. And maybe the most surprising one: people who are nowhere near a fire, but who are watching the news about it, show up in the mental health data too. We think of this as climate anxiety, and we can actually track it by looking at how much national news coverage a fire gets.

None of this makes the smoke effect smaller. It's still there, still real. But once you add in evacuation, local disruption, and this climate anxiety channel, the overall mental health impact of wildfire turns out to be 75% bigger than smoke alone would suggest. The hospitalizations we see most are for anxiety and substance use, and older people and those with existing health conditions are hit hardest.

In dollar terms: in the parts of Canada we studied (about 71% of the population), wildfire-related mental health hospitalizations cost around $29.4 million a year directly. Once you account for the broader mental health system, not just hospital stays, that number is closer to $130 million a year. And that's just the mental health piece, before any of the physical damage or economic disruption a fire causes.

The thing I'd want fire personnel to take away from this: how a fire season gets covered in the news isn't just background noise. It seems to be part of the exposure itself."

Fire weather outlook August 22-27

Current fire activity in southern BC and parts of the NWT continues to be of concern (Figure 1). An upper-level disturbance will bring much-needed rain to much of BC this weekend (August 22nd & 23rd), but hot and dry, fire-conducive conditions are expected in southern BC prior to the arrival of that system. This disturbance will also bring lightning (Figure 2), which may trigger new fire starts despite the rainfall, due to smouldering holdover fires that can persist and flare up later in the forecast period. The rain may largely bypass the extreme southern tier of BC.

The North Great Slave and Dehcho regions of the NWT will continue to experience fire-conducive fire weather for the next two weeks. The remainder of Canada is expected to see relatively quiet fire conditions, with the possible exceptions of northern Saskatchewan and parts of northwestern Ontario.

Figure 1: GOES – West GeoColor imagery loop showing numerous fires and extensive smoke plumes from fires in the Northwest Territories on August 17th, 2026.

Figure 2. ECMWF 12-hour lightning density forecast for BC on August 22nd, 2026.

A look ahead El Niño Update

El Niño is present. The following summary is drawn from the latest NOAA assessment. Read more here.

Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are above average across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean.
Atmospheric circulation anomalies over the equatorial Pacific Ocean are consistent with El Niño conditions.
El Niño is strengthening, with a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event during Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026-27 (Figure 3).
During the October-December 2026 season, there is a 69% chance of a historic event that would exceed the strength of all previous El Niño events on record since 1950.

Given the likelihood of a strong and potentially historic El Niño, there is a possibility that warm and dry conditions will prolong the fire season in BC and Washington State.