Statistics and Resources from the National Interagency Fire Center

For no particular reason other than I can be a little geeky about statistics, I have been curious about how the wildland fire season (year-to-date) compares with previous years. I found some summary statistics on that National Interagency Fire Center's webpage (NIFC) that you may find here. The page that I viewed was updated on May 17, 2019 which happens to be the day I am writing this. I should caution you that these are summary statistics. Hidden in these statistics, especially acreage are going to be very large fires. That is, 2009, 2011, 2016 through 2018 had year-to-date acreage over 1,000,000 acres, This year coming in at 226,078 acres is not the lowest, that goes to 2013. The table below of year-to-date statistics was obtained on May 17, 2019 from https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm. I think that there may be a typographical error, I believe that year-to-date refers to the current year, e.g. the current year's statistics would be from January 1, 2019 through May 17, 2019.

Year-to-date statistics (see note 1)
2019 (1/1/19 - 5/17/19)	Fires: 12,567	Acres: 226,078
2018 (1/1/18 - 5/17/18)	Fires: 21,997	Acres: 1,600,169
2017 (1/1/17 - 5/17/17)	Fires: 22,518	Acres: 2,108,768
2016 (1/1/16 - 5/17/16)	Fires: 18,188	Acres: 1,542,953
2015 (1/1/15 - 5/17/15)	Fires: 19,741	Acres: 375,155
2014 (1/1/14 - 5/17/14)	Fires: 22,527	Acres: 462,319
2013 (1/1/13 - 5/17/13)	Fires: 15,971	Acres: 211,225
2012 (1/1/12 - 5/17/12)	Fires: 20,,099	Acres: 473,859
2011 (1/1/11 - 5/17/11)	Fires: 25,804	Acres: 2,664,606
2010 (1/1/10 - 5/17/10)	Fires: 23,899	Acres: 348,404
2009 (1/1/09 - 5/17/09)	Fires: 32,251	Acres: 1,297,145
10-year average Year-to-Date
2009-2018	Fires: 22,752	Acres: 1,089,366

The National Interagency Coordination Center, an arm of NIFC, has current and archived data on wildfires by Coordination Center may be found on this webpage under Situation, National Products, Incident Management Situation Report.

One of the reasons why I am sharing these data to share this resources from NIFC for those of you who are not familiar with NIFC's resources. NIFC has a nice fire statistic page, mostly summary statistics. I am quite aware that there are likely to be other sources of historical wildfire statistics that I am not aware of either on the national level as well as regional and local. NIFC has a variety of other resources as well: aviation, fire shelters and safety to name a few. I will leave you to your devices to explore.

There is a video that I saw on the NIFC home page on the wildfire outlook for May and June of 2019 with seasonal outlooks for July and August. I am interested in hearing what Brian Henry, Assistant National Weather Fire Weather Program Manager for Predictive Services in Boise, Idaho has to say.


Direct link to video from NIFC

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Note 1: The data table showing year-to-date statistics as of May 17th was corrected to correct what I believe to be a typographical error. The original data on the website states that the year to date statistics goes back to January 1 of the preceding year (e.g. 2019 (1/1/18-5/17/19); 2018 (1/1/17-5/17/18, etc). I took the liberty of changing the year to date column to reflect the current year. Any errors in this presentation are my responsibility.