With more than half of Colorado in a state of severe to exceptional drought — its driest conditions since 2002 — fire has found opportune conditions to scorch a path this year across more than 200,000 acres in the state, torching dozens of buildings and prompting hundreds of people to evacuate.

“Given the (weak) snowpack conditions we’ve seen and the heat we’ve seen, we’ve put together the perfect ingredients for these kinds of fires,” Peter Goble, drought specialist with the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, said this week.

Snowpack levels in the southwest corner of the state, where the 416 fire has burned more than 54,000 acres north of Durango since June 1, were that area’s second-worst ever, Goble said. And the mid-May melt-out from higher elevations in the San Juan Mountains happened earlier than ever, he said.

Earlier this year, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska called the expected drought conditions for the Western United States in 2018 “alarming,” as measured snow depths in southwestern Colorado clocked in at 22 percent of normal in January.

“(The year) 2018 is right up there with 2002,” Goble said, drawing a comparison to the year that spawned Colorado’s largest wildfire — the 137,760-acre Hayman fire.

But he said there is reason to hope that the worst is over, as expected July rains should start to provide relief, especially to the southern half of the state, hardest hit by the arid conditions.

“I am expecting that the fire danger of the past week is at or near the peak we’ll see this season,” he said.

But even if the pace of new wildfires begins to slow for the rest of this summer, some climatologists worry that seasons of 200,000-plus acres burned in Colorado are becoming more commonplace. The state has crossed that threshold three times, the first time in 2002, but hadn’t even reached half that amount in any year during the three decades prior, according to data from the Colorado State Forest Service and the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

Jennifer Balch, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said there is an undeniable link between both a warming climate and increased aridity with wildfires that are mounting in scope and frequency across the American West.

“In the Western U.S., regional temperatures have increased by almost 2 degrees since the 1970s, snowmelt is occurring a month earlier in some places and fire season length has increased by almost three months,” she said. “As a consequence, the number of large fires has increased fivefold since the 1970s. Where there were 20 large fires a year then, since 2010 well over 100 large fires each year are burning.”

And with more people moving into Colorado and building new homes where once there was quiet forest land or empty prairie, Balch said, the fire danger goes up.

“Unlike other natural disasters, people do play a role in determining where and when fires start,” she said. “Over the last two decades in the continental United States, people started 84 percent of our wildfires.”

Michael Kodas, deputy director for the Center for Environmental Journalism at CU-Boulder, said the urban-wildland interface — where homes meet wilderness — is becoming more commonplace in Colorado. That fact, coupled with worsening drought conditions projected under a continued global warming scenario, only raises the danger that a fire will get sparked and that that fire will cause more damage once it gets going.

“When we develop into an area, we add fuel because we’re building homes and putting in propane tanks, and we’re opening up forest that used to be sheltered from the wind,” said Kodas, who wrote the 2017 book “Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame.” “And we have a large increase in the number of fire starters.”

A man from Denmark who is in the United States illegally was arrested last week in connection with starting the largest current blaze in the state — the 100,000-plus-acre Spring Creek fire in Costilla and Huerfano counties. Phil Daniels, deputy chief of the wildfire section of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, has been working the Spring Creek fire since it broke out June 27.

The more than 250 homes that have been either destroyed or damaged by the fire illustrate the role Colorado’s natural beauty plays in drawing people to live in areas off the beaten path but also the risk they take in locating so close to plentiful sources of fire fuel, especially when drought takes hold, he said.

“We like things that are green and pretty, so we put our houses in the middle of the green and pretty,” Daniels said.

CU’s Balch said removing fuels and creating defensible space around homes will only be so effective when nearby conditions reach ever-worsening levels of drought. Real improvement in the situation is dependent on people slowing or reversing the climate change trends of the last several decades.

“We can’t thin our way out of the problem — thinning all the forests is not possible, and even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently and will in the future,” she said. “However, we can incentivize building in places with less risk of severe fire that can be defended and we can educate the public about the increasing likelihood of more big fires in the years ahead so that people can be ready.”