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Wildfire burn area data was obtained from the Canadian National Fire Database (CNFDB), which compiles fire records from all provincial and territorial fire management agencies. This dataset includes the total hectares burned annually across all of Canada.
Air quality data was sourced from Environment and Climate Change Canada's National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) program. Hourly PM2.5 measurements from monitoring stations in Toronto were used to calculate daily averages.
A "bad air day" was defined as any day where the 24-hour average PM2.5 concentration exceeded 35 µg/m³, which corresponds to the threshold for "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" on the Air Quality Index (AQI) scale.
For each year from 2003 to 2023, we calculated the total annual burn area (in hectares) and the total number of bad air days in Toronto. A Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated to determine the strength of the relationship between these two variables. Additionally, we performed a linear regression analysis to model the predictive relationship.