"The individual wind and humidity conditions were rare but not unprecedented, but the combination of the two was," said Larry O'Neill, an associate professor in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a co-author of the paper. "And individually, they were some of the worst conditions we've seen since we began keeping records from instrumented data."

The weather and fire forecasts for this coming summer are not looking particularly good, either, he said.

"The situation looks as bad or worse than last year," O'Neill said. "Drought conditions have not recovered from last year, particularly in southern and eastern Oregon. Soil moistures remain low, and the vegetation fuel moisture has not recovered."

From Sept. 7 to 9, 2020, an estimated 11% of the Oregon Cascades burned in several large fires in western Oregon. The fires, which stretched from Clackamas County at the north to Douglas County at the south, burned more area of the Oregon Cascades than had burned in the previous 36 years combined and likely exceeded the area burned in any single year in at least the last 120 years, the researchers found.