Wildfires are increasingly burning California's snowy landscapes, colliding with winter droughts to shrink snowpack

The early pandemic years overlapped with some of California's worst wildfires on record, creating haunting, orange-tinted skies and wide swaths of burned landscape. Some of the impacts of these fires are well known, including drastic declines in air quality, and now a new study shows how these wildfires combined with midwinter drought conditions to accelerate snowmelt.