Red Flag Warning 9:20 a.m. PT, December 9, 2012. NWS.
A Red Flag Warning is in effect for portions of the mountains and inland valleys of southern California Sunday night through Tuesday. The forecast calls for gusty northeast winds and low relative humidities. The strongest winds will be Sunday night and Monday with sustained winds of 15 to 30 with gusts up to 50 mph. The lowest humidities will occur Monday. The details vary across southern California — the specifics can be found at the National Weather Service.
The map was current as of 9:20 a.m. PT on Sunday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the dozens of National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts. For the most current data, visit this NWS site.
As we first wrote on October 13, the Budget Control Act of 2001, called the “fiscal cliff”, will require federal wildland fire programs to be cut by at least $218 million, or 8.2 percent. Negotiations are underway to prevent the law from taking effect on January 2, 2013 as planned, but if lawmakers fail to come up with an alternative, there will be some very significant changes in the federal land management agencies.
…Sequestration will have a big—and negative—impact on land and ocean management agencies. Here’s how it’ll affect all Americans:
Less accurate weather forecasts
Slower energy development
Fewer wildland firefighters
Closures of national parks
Fewer places to hunt
Less fish on your table
Diminished maritime safety and security
[…]
But the U.S. Forest Service faces tremendous cuts to its firefighting capabilities under sequestration. Its “Wildland Fire Management” account, which funds preparedness, fire suppression, hazardous-fuels removal, restoration, and state fire assistance, among other things, is slated to be cut by $172 million in fiscal year 2013 if the sequester moves forward. Additionally, the Department of the Interior’s “Wildland Fire Management” account faces a $46 million cut next year. The department also funds the “FLAME Wildfire Suppression Reserve Fund,” which will be cut by $7 million under sequestration. In total, funding for wildland fire prevention and assistance at the land management agencies will be cut by $225 million.
Without such funding, not only will Americans’ property and lives be more at risk, but special places such as national forests and national parks will be less resilient in the face of future fires.
Church Camp fire, burnout along Highway 191. Photo credit: UT-FFSL
The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that slash burned after a logging operation on state land 22 miles south of Duchesne, Utah may have smoldered for 18 months before igniting a wildfire that burned 7,211 acres in June, 2012. The Church Camp fire was discovered June 24 and caused the evacuation of Argyle Canyon, a popular summer cabin and recreation area for Salt Lake City residents. The fire destroyed 15 homes and was suppressed at a cost of $5.7 million.
The investigation report is not yet final, but cause and origin investigators for the Utah Division of Forestry said there is no evidence that lightning, arson, or anything else — except the 18-month old slash burn — could have started the fire. They admit that it is “highly unlikely” that the slash burn was the cause, but they can’t come up with a more likely cause.
…One cabin owner told investigators that two weeks before the Church Camp Fire ignited, he and his daughter visited the slash pile. The cabin owner said he stepped in a 1½-inch pile of fluffy white ash that appeared to have been recently burned. The cabin owner said he suspected dirt around the pile was helping retain heat.
Also, another slash pile burned in the fall of 2011 several miles west of the Church Camp Fire reignited in the spring. The report implies this is evidence the 18-month-old burned slash pile could have reignited, too.
DC-10 dropping on Church Camp Fire – InciWeb photo
Lightning strikes near the Stage Hill Fire, Cascade, South Dakota, July 16, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert
NASA has analyzed the the effects of rising temperatures and wildland fire occurrence since 1984 and discovered an impressive fact:
Carbon emissions from [worldwide] fires have grown from an average of 8 teragrams (8.8 million tons) per year from 1984 to 1995 to an average of 20 teragrams (22 million tons) per year from 1996 to 2008, increasing 2.4 times in the latter period.
This is interesting. It documents the rising trend of wildland fire occurrence worldwide that we are are also experiencing in the United States. And since NASA predicts “increased fire activity across the United States in coming decades” it makes a person wonder how we are going to deal with more wildfires when we can’t handle the ones we are currently having.
Climate Models Project Increase in U.S. Wildfire Risk
WASHINGTON — Scientists using NASA satellite data and climate models have projected drier conditions likely will cause increased fire activity across the United States in coming decades. Other findings about U.S. wildfires, including their amount of carbon emissions and how the length and strength of fire seasons are expected to change under future climate conditions, were also presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
Doug Morton of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented the new analysis of future U.S. fire activity. The analysis was based on current fire trends and predicted greenhouse gas emissions.
“Climate models project an increase in fire risk across the U.S. by 2050, based on a trend toward drier conditions that favor fire activity and an increase in the frequency of extreme events,” Morton said. Continue reading “Carbon emissions from fires doubles”
Each dot represents a moment of pretty extreme heat, down to the one square kilometer level (I only retained fires greater than 100KW MW and of those only fires that the system was more than 50% confident of). They’ve been colored and scaled by “units” of the typical American nuclear power plant’s summertime capacity to provide some sort of baseline of the fires’ magnitude.
There are a couple temporal charts in there, too. The seasonal curve I would expect, but the overall upwards trend was interesting (and 2012 is only half through). Is it related to a lag-offset El Niño or La Niña effect?
In a meeting of the Western Governor’s Association last weekend in Phoenix, the governors praised the Phase III report of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. That document calls for enhanced collaborative efforts that will result in improved wildfire response, the creation of fire adapted communities, and the restoration of landscapes that are resilient to wildfire. The Phase III report can be downloaded HERE, but it is a large 9MB file.
The governors met Saturday with Harris Sherman, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, USDA, to discuss actions that can be taken immediately by Western states and the U.S. Forest Service under existing environmental protection authorities to reduce hazardous fuel conditions across the West.
“Wildfires pose a serious threat to people, property and water throughout the West–especially in the forested areas near communities,” said Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. “The federal government and the states need to work together to manage forest health and pool all available resources to reduce catastrophic wildfires before they start and fight the fires once they occur. We need to spend scarce resources wisely to achieve these goals of healthier forests and firefighting detection and suppression tools.”
