The US fire season is heating up. Are we in for severe blazes and burns?

A resident evacuates his horse as the Corral fire bears down on ranches west of Tracy, California, last week. Photograph: Kent Porter/AP

This week’s broiling heatwave in the US south-west is just the start of what experts warn will be a brutally hot summer, setting the stage for an active wildfire season – even in places that don’t burn often.

Thanks to a wet winter, the dangers could be delayed in many fire-prone regions across the west, including in California forests where the threats from catastrophic blazes are often high. But the extra rainfall also helped seed invasive grasses that spread across sparse arid landscapes, and rapidly dried as temperatures rose.