June 25, 2024

A Benign Wildfire Year and Upcoming Rain

 So far this year we have enjoyed a below-normal wildfire season in the Northwest due to a relatively cool and wet June, among other reasons.

Below is the typical distribution of fire frequency over Washington State by day of the year. Today is indicated by the purple line.   

We are now in the fire ramp-up period, with the highest frequency of the year on July 4th, when many folks start fires with fireworks.


Today, there are only four fires going in WA and northern Oregon, and they are all predominantly grass fires ignited by humans.  Keep in mind that only a few days of dry weather are more than enough to dry grass enough to burn.

The grass was particularly bountiful this year east of the Cascade crest due to the favorable growing conditions this spring.  The latest USDA Fuelcast estimates of fuel load in eastern Washington is quite high (see below).

And it looks like our low fire situation is not going away soon.   The latest UW WRF accumulated precipitation forecast for the next 72h shows the results of a wet system coming in Wednesday night and Thursday (see below).


And with that rain, surface fuels should be moistened, working against wildfire.  Below is the latest 7-day fire potential forecast produced by the Northwest Wildfire Coordinating Center.   Low fire potential for the next week (green colors).



What about the extended  precipitation forecast from the European Center ensemble system? Though July 10th above-normal precipitation in much of BC and western WA and near normal in eastern WA.


No red flags for an enhanced wildfire danger.  No heat waves forecast either.

There will be wildfires this summer  but at this point we seem to be following a normal weather trajectory.






7 comments:

  1. That's great news; thanks! I've lived adjacent to the national forest here for over fifty years, and I appreciate normal conditions. In the last few decades there has been much less logging, so many forest roads have closed. Access is essential, and I've become a bit concerned about the ability of crews to get to a fire event, heaven forbid we should have one due to careless action(s) or lightning. It's actually pretty rare to have a summer month without at least some rain here; good!

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    1. Occasional, low-intensity fire is a natural part of healthy forest ecology. USFS forests each have detailed management plans that include both managed fire events (naturally-occurring and accidental) and prescribed fires (fires deliberately set and carefully managed by fire crews). When an accidental fire occurs, the forestry team will weigh the cost vs. benefits of letting it burn.

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  2. The latest satellite image (1501 UTC) shows storm clouds over the east slopes – south of Lake Chelan. It was quite dark with thunder about 8 AM, now sunny at 8:12, near Ellensburg. The site "Lightning Maps dot org" shows the points of activity.

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  3. Mother Nature Bats Last, Cliff. We'll see.

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  4. Rains have been pretty good over and west of the Cascade crest lately but this has not reached much of the east slope areas. Wenatchee has recorded only .01" of rain so far this month and if no more rain falls this month this would be driest June since 1960 and this follows a dry April and May. Most likely any rain we get from here on into summer will not be significant enough to prevent another potentially bad fire season in these drier areas. While you say we have had only a few grass fires so far, these are relatively early fires for the area in which they are burning, which is a indicator of the dryness of this spring. Hopefully some of the forecast models that are indicating a significant warm up in another week or so around July 4th, do not verify.

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  5. This spring (April-June) has been quite cool and rainy in Bellingham. In fact, it's been similarly rainy and even cooler than the same period during the notably wet and cool spring of 2022. I call this "old school" PNW weather as the mean April-June temperature at BLI is nearly equal to the mean April-June temperature for the 1950-1980 period. The current climate normal mean temperature for April-June is just about 2F warmer than what we've experienced this year and what was normal during the middle of the 20th century - consistent with observations of ~2F of warming for the region since 1950. While 2F of warming is easy to dismiss as insignificant, it's been quite noticeably cooler than normal around here despite being only about 2F cooler than normal - noticeably less air conditioning and more heating required for comfortable indoor temperatures. It turns out that "only" ~2F of warming does, indeed, clearly make a substantial difference in how the weather actually feels to humans and, consequently, what we do to adapt to our new normal.

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  6. Jno62, if you look at what the CPC said early spring vs what has happened you can see they hyped up long hot summer that hasn't yet to come, for us anyway. Called for drought declaration due to it and have probably already allocated millions for nothing so far. My point is why do we condition people to not look objectively at the long range models and not always fear the worse or over react. Most will say we have to be proactive, in many we cases we can still be reactive and save money and undo anxiety.

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