April 2026 Florida wildfires have been fueled by meteorological conditions strengthened by human-driven climate change

Contact Authors

• Davide Faranda (IPSL-CNRS) - davide.faranda@lsce.ipsl.fr - EN/FR/IT

• Tommaso Alberti (INGV) - tommaso.alberti@ingv.it  - EN/IT

• Haosu Tang (University of Sheffield, UK) – haosu.tang@sheffield.ac.uk – ZH/EN

• Neven Fučkar (University of Oxford, UK) – neven.fuckar@ouce.ox.ac.uk – EN/HR

• Marco Chericoni (CMCC Foundation)  - marco.chericoni@cmcc.it - EN/IT

Citation

• Faranda, D., Alberti, T., Tang, H., Fučkar, N. S., & Chericoni, M. (2026). April 2026 Florida wildfires have been fueled by meteorological conditions strengthened by human-driven climate change. ClimaMeter, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, CNRS. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19609525

Press Summary

• Meteorological conditions similar to those triggering the April 2026 Florida wildfires are about 1 °C warmer, around 1 mm/day drier, and locally up to 3 to 5 km/h windier in the present compared to the past, over Florida and nearby areas. 

• The event was associated with very rare meteorological conditions. 

• We attribute the warmer, drier, and in some places windier conditions favoring the April 2026 Florida wildfires primarily to human-driven climate change, while natural climate variability likely played a secondary role.

Event Description

In mid-April 2026, a major wildfire outbreak affected southwest Florida, with the Newman Drive Fire burning in the Picayune Strand State Forest in Collier County, south of Interstate 75 and east of Naples. Local and state authorities issued evacuation orders, monitored smoke impacts on roads including I-75, and mobilized crews from multiple agencies. 

On April 14, the fire had reached 1,733 acres and 60% containment, after earlier reports placed it near 1,500 acres and only 15% contained. The National Interagency Fire Center described extreme fire behavior, including running fire and long-range spotting, with residences threatened, and evacuations in effect. This wildfire developed in a broader statewide context of severe fire danger. 

Florida officials warned in early April that the state had already experienced more than 1,500 fires, burning nearly 100,000 acres since January 1, roughly half of the typical annual total. They linked the dangerous background conditions to extraordinary drought, low humidity, and an unusually strong freeze that left vegetation dry. Independent reporting and public statements also noted that drought had sharply increased fire danger across Florida before the Naples fire.

The meteorological setting during the period 9-13 April 2026 at the onset of the wildfires is consistent with a fire-favorable pattern over Florida. Surface pressure shows positive anomalies (+4-6 hPa) over the southeastern United States and Florida, indicating a broad high pressure influence. Near-surface air temperature anomalies indicate warmer than normal conditions across most of the peninsula, with the strongest positive anomalies (+2 °C) over northern Florida. Very limited rainfall was observed over most of the peninsula during this 5-day event, with more substantial precipitation displaced offshore and near the far south. Windspeed data show sustained winds generally between 20 km/h to 40 km/h across large parts of Florida, with stronger values over the southern peninsula and nearby waters. 

Our analysis is based on ERA5 and GFS data. These atmospheric products assimilate observations, but since their horizontal resolution is 0.25°≈30 km, they do not reproduce exactly what was measured at individual weather stations. Additional local reporting is available from WGCU and Miami Weather Service.

Climate and Data Background for the Analysis

Wildfires are responsible for about 70% of global biomass burning each year and release vast amounts of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols, including air pollutants of public health concerns (van der Werf et al., 2017). Extreme weather conditions, such as heatwaves, droughts, and low precipitation, contribute to the conditions that favor wildfires. Although fires are a natural aspect  of ecosystem dynamics, the IPCC AR6 WG1 highlights the growing influence of climate change on fire weather and wildfire frequency and extent. Indeed, the effect of climate change on the frequency and intensity of climate extremes contributes, in turn, to the change in the frequency and intensity of wildfires.  

The IPCC report states with medium to high confidence that human-induced climate change has significantly increased areas burned by wildfires in certain regions and lengthened fire weather seasons. Furthermore, wildfires now affect regions previously unexposed to such risk (Jolly et al., 2015, Artés et al., 2019).  In recent years, fire seasons of unprecedented magnitude have occurred in diverse regions such as California (Goss et al. 2020), the Mediterranean basin (Ruffault et al. 2020), and Brazilian Pantal (Ferreira Barbosa et al., 2022).  

Williams et al. (2019) observed that, in California, the annual burned area increased fivefold during 1972–2018, mainly due to summer forest fires and that large fall fires are likely to become more frequent with global warming. Moreover, Goss et al. (2020) showed that in California the observed frequency of autumn days with extreme fire weather has more than doubled since the early 1980s. 

The National Weather Service drought statement for South Florida indicated extreme drought over most of South Florida, a water shortage warning for Collier and Glades counties, burn bans in Collier, Hendry, and Glades counties, KBDI values of 500–550 in Collier County, and western South Florida soil moisture in the 10th to 20th percentile. 

Our analysis approach rests on identifying weather situations similar to those associated with the event of interest observed in the past. For this event, we have medium to high confidence in the robustness of our approach given the available climate data, as the event is similar to other past events in the historical record.

ClimaMeter Analysis 

We analyze here (see Methodology for more details) how events similar to the meteorological conditions leading to the April 2026 Florida wildfires have changed in the present, 1988 to 2025, compared to what they would have looked like in the past, 1950 to 1987. 

In figure 1, the Surface Pressure Changes show a modest dipole pattern, with slightly higher pressure over northern Florida and lower pressure toward the south, but without a clear large-scale pressure shift dominating the event. The Temperature Changes show that similar events in the present climate are warmer than in the past over most of Florida, with the strongest warming over northern Florida and positive anomalies generally around 0.5 to 1.5 °C. The Precipitation Changes show drier conditions across much of the peninsula, with reductions locally close to 1 mm/day. The Windspeed Changes indicate slightly weaker winds over the far north of the domain but stronger winds over central and southern Florida, with local increases of roughly 3 to 5 km/h. Stronger winds play a key role in wildfire spread and intensity, and notably the wind increase coincides spatially with the area affected by the April 2026 Florida wildfires.

We also observe that Similar Past Events occurred mainly in March and April in the past period, while in the present climate the fraction of events in April decreases and the fraction in May increases, suggesting a later seasonal shift in the occurrence of analogous fire weather patterns. The analysis of the affected urban areas shows positive temperature changes in Orlando, Miami, and Tampa, around 0.3 to 0.7 °C, little change in precipitation in Orlando and Miami but a drying signal in Tampa, and stronger winds in Orlando and Tampa of roughly 1 to 1.5 km/h, while Miami does not show a robust wind increase. 

Finally, we cannot detect the influence of natural climate variability on the event. This means that the changes we see in the event compared to the past may be primarily due to human-driven climate change.

Conclusion

Based on the above, we conclude that meteorological conditions similar to those triggering the April 2026 Florida wildfires are about 1 °C warmer, around 1 mm/day drier, and locally 3 to 5 km/h windier in the present compared to the past over Florida and nearby areas. We interpret the April 2026 Florida wildfires as an extreme event driven by very rare meteorological conditions with characteristics strengthened by human-driven climate change.