The size of the western wildfires is something I find really difficult to internalize or understand. Reading the news you often come across numbers like 200,000 Acres burned, but this doesn’t provide any perspective for me.

To better understand this, I’ve created the following chart which normalizes the yearly wildfire totals as the percent of California. Turns out that CA is almost exactly 100 million acres (104,765,000 to be exact), making the math incredibly straightforward, assuming you can keep track of the significant digits.

The below chart is what fires consumption normalized to the size of California (and the trailing 5- and 10-year sums). Over the last 10 years fires burned more than 10% of the state.

The source of the data is Cal Fire Stats.