The accumulated hours of bright sunshine provide a simple index of fire season severity for the southern coastal area of British Columbia. This index, based on the period May 1 to August 31, is highly correlated with the annual acreage burned over the Vancouver Forest District.By removing that part of the year-by-year deviation in area burned which can be attributed to variations in this weather index, it is possible to see more clearly the effects of other controls on the annual fire load.The existence of appreciable fluctuations of summer sunshine over periods of the order of decades would suggest that 10-year averages of fire statistics are not long enough to be independent of the effects of weather.
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Jeffery A. Turner (1970) studied this question.