On March 8 we looked back at the weather in the United States over the last three months knowing that it could have an effect on wildfires over the next three to six months. However the extent to which past weather influences future fires is debatable and can be overridden by the weather conditions during the fire season.
What is YOUR prediction for the 2015 fire season? Like the first robin you see in the spring, the assignment of the first Type 1 Incident Management Team (IMT) is a sign that things are getting real. In the last few years there have been about 30 to 50 assignments each year for T1 IMTs.
So let’s have a contest about the date the first Type 1 IMT will be assigned on a fire.
How to enter: In a comment below this article give us your prediction of the date the first Type 1 IMT will be assigned to a fire in 2015. In case more than one person selects the correct date, include the state. A second tie breaker will be the general area within that state. The date is defined by the date they are actually dispatched to a fire, not necessarily arriving at the fire. For the purposes of this contest, a Type 1 IMT includes only the 16 national interagency IMTs listed here. Only one entry per person, of course.
Deadline for entries: write your date with the two tie breakers in a comment below this article before April 1, 2015. If an IMT is assigned before April 1, the deadline for entries will change retroactively to the day before that fire started.
Prize: the winner will receive a limited edition Wildfire Today cap. So that we can contact the winner, you must enter your correct email address in the form when you are writing your comment. As usual, email addresses will never be disclosed to anyone without your specific permission.
Thanks and a tip of the hat for the idea go out to Dick.
Astronomical winter does not end until March 20, but we are already mentally summarizing the weather we experienced over the last three months and are thinking about what the spring and summer wildfire seasons might look like. Below are charts from NOAA showing this winter’s precipitation, temperature, snow cover, and lastly the drought outlook.
Below is the legend for the amount, in inches, that the predicted snow depth (shown on the following maps) on March 9 will depart from normal.
According to NOAA’a National Climatic Data Center, during February the average temperature in the contiguous United States was 33.1°F, or 0.7°F below the 20th century average. It was frigid in the east, and much warmer than average in the far west.
Last month in the contiguous U.S., average precipitation was 1.70 inch, or 0.43 inch below average.
The Predictive Services section at the National Interagency Fire Center has issued their Wildland Fire Potential Outlook for March through June. The data represents the cumulative forecasts of the eleven Geographic Area Predictive Services Units and the National Predictive Services Unit.
If their predictions are accurate, fire potential should be increasing in the upper midwest and mid-south, it is expected to be normal in the west, and higher than normal in Alaska and Hawaii.
Here are the highlights from their outlook.
March
Above normal significant wildland fire potential exists across much of the Hawaiian Islands.
Below normal significant wildland fire potential is expected for the Southeast from Texas to the mid-Atlantic as well as Puerto Rico.
Normal significant wildland fire potential elsewhere.
April
Above normal significant wildland fire potential will develop throughout the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes.
Above normal significant wildland fire potential will continue across much of Hawaii.
Below normal significant wildland fire potential will continue along the coastal plain of the Southeast and through central Texas as well as Puerto Rico.
May through June
Above normal significant wildland fire potential will develop across portions of Southern California. Above normal significant wildland fire potential will continue across much of Hawaii.
Above normal significant wildland fire potential will reduce to normal across the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes.
Below normal significant wildland fire potential will develop across the Southwest and continue on the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast coasts.
The Round Fire north of Bishop, California, February 10, 2015. Photo by Jerry Dodrill, used with permission.
The High Country News has an interesting article about the lengthening of the wildfire seasons. Below is an excerpt:
…For local residents, [the 7,000-acre Round Fire north of Bishop, CA on February 10, 2015] drove home a message Westerners may finally have to get used to: Fire season isn’t just confined to the months of July and August anymore, or even May through September. Over the last four decades, the season across the West has gotten two and a half months longer. Last year, rare January fires swept across southern California. And just last week, the Round Fire wasn’t the only abnormally early burn to hit the West. A spate of wildfires broke out in northern Utah Feb. 8 and 9, burning a few hundred acres.
These early season fires owe much to the ongoing drought. The area burned by the Round Fire is usually covered in snow at this time of year, but [local photographer Jim] Stimson said the ground is bare. California’s paltry snowpack, dry soils and unseasonably warm temperatures make it easier for a spark, whether caused by humans or lightning, to catch and travel faster and farther than usual. While it’s nearly impossible to pin any particular fire event to climate change, we do know that the changing climate exacerbates the drought, which leads to more fires. Scientists say that Westerners can almost certainly expect more early-season fires like the Round, as climate change continues…
“Know the weather,” Sun Tzu advised around 320 B.C. “Your victory will then be total.”
On a large wildland fire there will most likely be a weather forecaster embedded with the Incident Management Team. Called an Incident Meteorologist, or IMET, they provide invaluable information about the weather that affects the behavior of the fire. Their localized forecasts, called “spot weather forecasts”, are enhanced by environmental data collected at the fire scene combined with a massive nationwide database of other observations and the output from computer models.
An Incident Meteorologist at a wildland fire. NOAA photo.
Since weather, along with topography and fuels, has a huge effect on what a wildfire does, Fire Behavior Analysts and Incident Management Teams rely heavily on IMETs. Their forecasts can help prevent firefighters from choosing a bad location from which to make a stand, or provide information that can help determine if a proposed burnout operation will be successful.
The military has relied on meteorologists to varying degrees over the last couple of hundred years. George Washington crossed the Delaware River during a blizzard so his troops would not be detected, and changed the course of the Revolutionary War. In 1979 the military attempted to rescue 52 Americans held captive in Iran, but instead of embedding weather forecasters before the operation began, they relied on desk meteorologists from thousands of miles away in Nebraska, who failed to detect or forecast shrouds of chalk-white dust, invisible to the satellites above, billowing for hundreds of miles near the surface. Three aircraft suffered accidents when trying to land or take off from the remote site — the mission failed before it really got started.
In recent years the military has again discovered the importance of having accurate weather forecasts, and the necessity of collecting weather observations and making forecasts from the scene of the action.
Before Seal Team Six raided the lair of Osama bin Laden, at least two Special Operations Weather Technicians, known as SOWT (pronounced sow-tee), were on the ground in Pakistan before the rest of the team arrived in their helicopters.
A Special Operations Weather Team member collects weather data using specialized equipment. Photo via NBC News.
“On a moonless night in October 2001, an American helicopter lifted off from an airbase in Uzbekistan, banking south on a covert mission into Afghanistan. Inside was one of America’s most elite and unknown special operators, hand-selected for a job so important that the wider war on terror hinged on its success.
In New York and Washington, D.C., the funerals continued. Families gave up hope of a miracle rescue in the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But if this soldier succeeded he would never shoot his gun and no one outside the military would know his work.
He was a weatherman.
More precisely, he was a special operations weather technician, known as a SOWT (pronounced sow-tee). As the Department of Defense’s only commando forecasters, SOWTs gather mission-impossible environmental data from some of the most hostile places on Earth.
They embed with Navy SEALs, Delta Force and Army Rangers. Ahead of major operations they also head in first for a go/no-go forecast. America’s parachutes don’t pop until a SOWT gives the all-clear.
That was Brady Armistead’s job as his helicopter rumbled toward a strip of desert 80 miles south of Kandahar, the capital of the Taliban government. He had a satellite forecast calling for clear skies. But satellite forecasts depend on ground data, too, and there was nothing from Afghanistan.
Five years earlier, when the Taliban seized power, it granted sanctuary to Al Qaeda and ruled by a strict interpretation of the Koran. No television or movies, mandatory burkas for women and long beards for men — plus no weather reports.
The Taliban considered forecasting to be sorcery. They fired the country’s 600 or so professional meteorologists, shelled the Afghan Meteorological Authority, and burned the country’s vast climatological archives.
That created a blind spot in global weather data, which is typically pooled and shared between the world’s governments. The Pentagon felt it had a fix in SOWTs like Armistead, jump-ready scientists with the God-given guts to do the weather behind enemy lines…”
Some university and federal government scientists have concluded there is a link between smoke generated by vegetation fires in Central America and the intensity of tornadoes in the southeast United States. Their research was funded primarily by the federal government, but if you want a copy of their results it will cost you $38 — rather than making the government funded product available to taxpayers as an Open Access document.
Below are some highlights of their research.
Can smoke from fires intensify tornadoes?
“Yes,” say University of Iowa researchers, who examined the effects of smoke—resulting from spring agricultural land-clearing fires in Central America—transported across the Gulf of Mexico and encountering tornado conditions already in process in the United States.
The UI study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the smoke impacts on a historic severe weather outbreak that occurred during the afternoon and evening of April 27, 2011. The weather event produced 122 tornadoes, resulted in 313 deaths across the southeastern United States, and is considered the most severe event of its kind since 1950.
The outbreak was caused mainly by environmental conditions leading to a large potential for tornado formation and conducive to supercells, a type of thunderstorm. However, smoke particles intensified these conditions, according to co-lead authors Gregory Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Pablo Saide, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) postdoctoral fellow.
They say the smoke lowered the base of the clouds and increased wind shear, defined as wind speed variations with respect to altitude. Together, those two conditions increased the likelihood of more severe tornadoes. The effects of smoke on these conditions had not been previously described, and the study found a novel mechanism to explain these interactions.
“These results are of great importance, as it is the first study to show smoke influence on tornado severity in a real case scenario. Also, severe weather prediction centers do not include atmospheric particles and their effects in their models, and we show that they should at least consider it,” says Carmichael.
“We show the smoke influence for one tornado outbreak, so in the future we will analyze smoke effects for other outbreaks on the record to see if similar impacts are found and under which conditions they occur,” says Saide. “We also plan to work along with model developers and institutions in charge of forecasting to move forward in the implementation, testing and incorporation of these effects on operational weather prediction models.”
In order to make their findings, the researchers ran computer simulations based upon data recorded during the 2011 event. One type of simulation included smoke and its effect on solar radiation and clouds, while the other omitted smoke. In fact, the simulation including the smoke resulted in a lowered cloud base and greater wind shear.
Future studies will focus on gaining a better understanding of the impacts of smoke on near-storm environments and tornado occurrence, intensity, and longevity, adds Carmichael, who also serves as director of the Iowa Informatics Initiative and co-director of CGRER.
Paper co-authors are Scott Spak ofthe UI Departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering; Bradley Pierce and Andrew Heidinger of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellite and Information Service Center for Satellite Applications and Research; Jason Otkin and Todd Schaack of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Arlindo da Silva of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Meloë Kacenelenbogen and Jens Redemann of NASA.
The paper “Central American biomass burning smoke can increase tornado severity in the U.S.” can be found online [for a fee of up to $38].
The research was funded by grants from NASA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Fulbright-CONICYT scholarship program in Chile.
On March 8 we looked back at the weather in the United States over the last three months knowing that it could have an effect on wildfires over the next three to six months. However the extent to which past weather influences future fires is debatable and can be overridden by the weather conditions during the fire season.
