We’ve been through about a third of the wildfire season in the Northwest now, and it’s looking very benign so far.
In fact, wildfires are at a low for wildfires across the United States The reality is very different from some of the fear-inducing headlines in some media.
Let me prove this to you.
Let’s start with the US wildfire area to date (July 13), from the National Interagency Fire Center (see below). This year has the LOWEST forest fire area in ten years.
I also plotted the 10-year trend (dashed line). It is decreasing slightly….no statistically significant trend at all. The situation does not get worse for early season fires.
What about the wildfires in Washington State? Below are the year-to-date burned areas (through July 10) provided by the Washington State DNR (this is a subset of the State of WA for which the DNR is responsible).
2023 has been a very benign year, with the third lowest wildfire area in the last ten years and just 8% of the ten-year average.
So far this year, Washington State has seen only a handful of significant grass/wildfires, most of which were caused by careless humans.
We are prone to grass fires this year because last year there was a lot of rain so the grass grew a lot. Grass fires occur every year because grass and grazing land dries out quickly at the beginning of each summer in the Pacific Northwest.
The current wildfire situation today (shown below) has only two (grass) fires in Washington State: the Baird Spring Fire (95%), 95% controlled, and the Wagner Road fire in the southeast Spokane.
Here are the efforts to extinguish the fire on Wagner Street:
Such grass fires have minimal association with climate change. And there has been very little wildfire activity this year so far.
I continue to be optimistic about this wildfire season because the atmosphere seems to favor a persistent low-pressure trough offshore, which works against wildfire development in the Northwest.
To illustrate, here’s a forecast for an upper elevation (like pressure) of about 18,000 ft. on July 22 at 11pm. Blue indicates trough…the pressure is lower at the top. A band of high pressure is concentrated in the Rockies. Heatwaves and major fire situations are associated with a strong upper-level high pressure band along the central British Columbia coast and enhanced high pressure offshore. This is not a forecast pattern for the next week or so.
.png)
Central Europe’s multiple forecasts show a similar superior pattern on Sunday morning, more than a week from now:
