Fire Danger in Oregon

Folks in the business of assessing fire risk are naturally a pessimistic lot.  That's especially true of those who warn of forest and grass fires, since part of the purpose of those warnings is to get the public to be more careful.  As the last paragraph of this article notes, people in a couple parts of Oregon may need to be especially careful this year. 

There may be patches of snow still in the Sierras and a lush grass crop growing in the Great Basin, but a federal forecast released Monday says above-normal temperatures this summer across the West will boost wildfire potential.

The latest national fire outlook by federal land management agencies predicts increasing fire danger across the western U.S., with the exception of Alaska, where the potential is below-normal due to persistent showers this spring and summer.

July is considered a critical month for the fire season in the interior West. If the current trend of drier-than-normal precipitation and hotter-than-normal temperatures continues, the growth of grassy vegetation from two successive moist springs could quickly dry out and create the potential for large, fast-moving range fires.

"The big wildcard in July is how soon the monsoons come into the Southwest," said Larry Van Bussum, national fire weather operations manager for the National Weather Service. "The monsoons are a blessing for the Southwest because they get a lot of rain, but for the Great Basin and the Rockies, those monsoons spark a lot of thunderstorms with lightning, though not necessarily a lot of rain."

...

The multiagency National Predictive Services Group, which prepares the forecast, says the greatest fire danger in the Pacific Northwest comes from dry, dead trees and vegetation in the Klamath Basin of Oregon and along the border of Idaho, Oregon and Washington through Hells Canyon.

Wet winters don't necessarily bring lower fire risks.

Comments

[pril]

we came back from Reno through the Siskiyou-Trinity NF, and went to see Glass Mountain and the Arcinca Sink. At 7800 ft (glass mountain) there was still snow on the ground in patches. However, that whole area is just a huge fire waiting to happen. There's a really scary amount of fuel on the forest floor. In fact, coming back down NF97N we stopped at an overlook and there was a fire that looked like it had just started across the valley on one of the ridges. It had been clear and sunny all day, so it was probably a human that started it.

[pril]

oops.shasta-siskiyou :p

[pril]

aarrgh. shasta-trinity

[Mike]

Driving N on I5 near Redding a week ago,the sky was lit by lightning for hours. From the Trinities to Mt. Shasta to Mt. Lassen.Really big sparklers.

[degustibus]

Firefighters I know are looking forward to a long hot summer.