u/BelinCan

Fires across all of Northern Canada, image from fire.airnow.gov

From the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/ 109 new fires just today

The total number of fires just passed the 10 moving average

Good news is in the YTD statistics the total amount burned is still below the moving averages historically. Though the upward trend is very clear in this data.

A lot of new fires just started in Northern Canada over the last few weeks. Looking at the fire.airnow.gov map and zooming in on northern Manitoba, Alberta or Quebec is quite scary, hundreds in decently small areas and somehow very equally spaced. The good news is the total amount of acres burned is below the running averages right now, but the total number of fires just passed previous years which may indicate a sharp uptick in the amount of actively burning areas we may see this summer.

Tool: custom Monte-Carlo bracket model in Python (NumPy, pandas), 10,000 simulated 2026 World Cups; charts in Matplotlib. Data: our match model plus the live bracket and results. Source: uanalyse.co.uk

The chart is a before/after of each contender's title probability: the grey dot is the pre-tournament forecast, the coloured dot is after the group stage. Green means the team gained title share, red means it lost it. The story is two teams crossing: Argentina rose from 9.1% to 13.6%, Spain fell from 13.5% to 9.6% even though it qualified, and France held the top at 14.6%.

Underneath it, the 16 eliminated teams held about a quarter of the Round of 32 places and 6.1% of the title board before kickoff. The deeper the round, the less they were ever expected to matter, so most of that redistributed probability flowed to teams that won their groups and got cleaner knockout draws.

Full breakdown: https://uanalyse.co.uk/blog/world-cup-2026-after-group-stage-predictions Live board (updates after each match): https://uanalyse.co.uk/world-cup-2026