2 fires burning in California are now the state's 2nd and 3rd biggest ever — here's the ranking

• Hundreds of wildfires are burning in California after nearly 11,000 bolts of lightning struck the state early last week.
• The two biggest fires are the second and third largest in state history. A full ranking is below.

California firefighters are currently battling the second- and third-largest blazes the state has ever seen. And they're fighting both at once.

The LNU Lightning Complex Fire, the state's biggest active fire as of Monday, has burned more than 350,000 acres across Napa, Sonoma, Lake, and Solano counties. But it's only a few thousand acres larger than the SCU Lightning Complex Fire, which is burning southeast of San Francisco. California's largest fire ever recorded, the Mendocino Complex Fire in July 2018, burned 459,000 acres.

The chart below shows the state's 16 biggest recorded blazes.

After nearly 11,000 bolts of lightning rained down on California last week at the end of a heat wave, 625 wildfires ignited across the state. The flames have been whipped along by strong winds and fed by dry foliage. In total, the fires have spread across more than 1.2 million acres, killed six people, and destroyed over 1,000 buildings.

A statewide emergency has been in effect since Tuesday, and smoke has blanketed regions including the Bay Area, lowering air quality for millions of people.

Climate change is making wildfires bigger, stronger, and more frequent

While the LNU and SCU complexes are bigger than almost every other fire California has ever seen, scientific evidence shows that enormous seasonal blazes are part of the state's new normal. As land gets hotter and drier due to climate change, fires become both bigger and more frequent.

Nine of the 10 biggest wildfires in California history have happened in the last 20 years, according to the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. When it comes to the most destructive fires (measured by structures burned), seven of California's top 10 were in the last five years.

The 2018 Camp Fire was both the deadliest and most destructive in California history — it killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,800 structures.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a press conference on Monday that the scale of the current fires is linked to climate change.

"We are in a different climate, and we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires, [the] likes of which we haven't seen in modern recorded history," he said.

A recent analysis by Stanford University found that average temperatures during wildfire season in California have risen by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1980s, while precipitation has dropped by 30%. Those conditions have more than doubled the state's total number of extreme wildfire risk days.

But the trend isn't limited to California. Large wildfires in the US overall now burn more than twice the area they did in 1970. In the western part of the country, the average wildfire season is 78 days longer than it was 50 years ago.