The latest wildfire season forecast confirms the worries of many: this could be a big one for much of the West.
“What this outlook is telling us is that we are set up for a potentially very long and very busy fire season,” said Jim Wallman, a meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).
The monthly NIFC outlooks are typically staid documents, providing just-the-facts analysis. But the latest is superlative-laden as it describes record-low snowpacks, record-early snow melt and record-high temperatures.
“If we're seeing things that are so outside the realm that could contribute to fire in advance, and we're seeing things that are exceptional, we need to mention that too, because that has the potential to really impact our fire season,” he said. “Especially the snowpack.”
“[S]everal river basins in the Southwest and Great Basin have no snow at any of their monitoring stations, such as the Humboldt Basin in Nevada, and the Lower San Juan Basin in the Four Corners,” one notable section of the current outlook reads. “The melt-off in these basins is not just several weeks or months earlier than normal, but also 4-6 weeks earlier than the previously recorded earliest melt-off dates.”
This month, above average potential for significant wildfires is expected in much of New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. The rest of the west is average – and no parts are below average. By June, much of the Four Corners states and large swaths of the Northwest are red - the color for higher than normal potential. If many parts of the West are burning intensely and simultaneously, resources can get stretched thin, according to Wallman.
“That's really concerning to us,” he said.
In some ways, the fire season is well underway. More than 1.6 million acres have already burned, driven by massive grassfires in the Plains states.
“We're seeing a lot of things that are really concerning much earlier than we ever have before,” Wallman said of the season’s early weeks.
“This is an important year to get prepared,” said Crystal Raymond, deputy director of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative.
New research is also providing insight into how low snow packs – like the historic snow drought now hitting much of the region – affect the following fire season. A recently published paper confirmed the previously established relationship between early snowmelts and more acres being burned. But it also showed that low snow years can significantly increase the intensity of burning, raising the risk of forest loss and conversion to grass or shrublands.
“And those changes in turn can cascade into impacts on carbon storage, water resources, habitat for wildlife, what have you,” said lead author Jared Balik, a research scientist at Western Colorado University.
Given the climate change-fueled trend toward lower, faster-melting snowpacks, Balik said it’s getting more urgent to prepare the land for inevitable wildfire.
“We need to take whatever action we can now to precondition our landscapes – do those fuel reduction treatments, do prescribed burning when we can – to help avoid more catastrophic fires in the future,” he added.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
