Wildfire Situation Update 28 August 2023
This year, wildfires across Russia have been quite extensive. As soon as the surface snow melted with the onset of spring, wildfires would spontaneously flare up. Many of these fires are likely to be “zombie” fires, which smoulder underground during winter and reemerge in spring. However, Kyrios’ ongoing interventions have helped to keep the extent of the wildfires across Russia in check. In comparison, wildfires in Canada that were not under intervention, have burned on uncontrollably and scorched close to 15 million hectares to date.
Kyrios first began intervening on 8 May to extinguish wildfires in the region north of Kazakhstan. When the hotspots there were mostly extinguished, new wildfires flared up in the Far East region. As such, Kyrios announced a new phase of wildfire intervention focusing on the Russia Far East on 4 July. As the Far East region is vast, Kyrios focused first on the Magadan Oblast region where she extinguished most hotspots there by 12 August. Kyrios then shifted attention to south Yakutia and diverted storm clouds that were remnants of Typhoon Khanun away from Primorsky and Khabarovsk towards the wildfires in south Yakutia.
Figure 1: Areas where Kyrios have intervened to extinguish Russia's wildfires in 2023. Phase 1 covered an area stretching 1,200km from Yekaterinburg, to Kurgan, Tyuman, Omsk and Novosibirsk, while Phase 2 spans 1,600km in the Russia Far East region of the Republic of Sakha.
Since then, south Yakutia experienced extensive rainfall on 13 to 15 August, and again on 18 and 19 August. Due to extensive cloud cover, we could not determine if the hotspots were extinguished until the skies cleared on 26 August. On this day, we were able to confirm that the extensive wildfires across the south Yakutia area have been extinguished (see Figure 2 below).
Figure 2: Comparison of hotspots detected on (before Kyrios' intervention) and (after Kyrios' intervention). We could only provide confirmation on 26 August when the cloud cover was minimal and hotspot data by NASA's MODIS instrument aboard Terra and Aqua satellites was available.
As the wildfires season is still ongoing, we will continue to monitor and update here when there are new developments.
Are you living in these regions? If so, we’re hoping to get more first-hand eyewitness accounts. Please reach us via email. Follow us on Twitter @Kyrios_Earth and Facebook @KyriosEarthHealerEn for updates.
Data sources: NASA Worldview, MODIS instrument aboard Terra and Aqua satellites
About Kyrios’ climate interventions
Kyrios’ climate interventions across key areas on Earth aims to reduce impact of disasters on local communities through deliberate weather modifications, healing Earth’s systems and providing us time to move towards a more sustainable future. This complements existing mitigation and adaptation measures. Kyrios also intervenes in climate disasters to reduce their destructive impacts on affected communities.
For more information on Kyrios’ climate crisis interventions, please go here. If you have questions, feel free to ask them here.
