The Seattle Times continues to blatantly exaggerate and exaggerate the impacts of climate change in the region.
They really went overboard this week regarding the bushfires.
Yesterday’s front page featured a large banner headline stating that western Washington faces an above-normal risk of wildfires.
Why? They claim because of low snowfall and rainfall.
The truth is there is no reason to expect an above-normal wildfire season in western Washington this summer. Let me tell you about the situation and note that I am writing a paper on this topic (meteorology of western wildfires) for my real day job.
Wildfires in western Washington require very different conditions than wildfires in the interior Northwest. Specifically to start a major wildfire in the wet/cool West require strong easterly direction (from the easterly flow).
Large wildfires in Western Washington are rare because the region is wet and dominated by cool, moist maritime air.
The strong eastward flow pushes marine air outward and causes warming and drying as the air sinks down the western slopes of the Cascades and Olympic. And this strong easterly flow must occur during a very limited period of time when the fuel is dry enough to burn: essentially the end of August and the first half of September.
The last major wildfire in the west occurred in September 1951 in the northwest of the Olympic Mountains near Forks (about 33,000 acres). Strong northeast winds were observed. There have been several smaller wildfires in western Washington (again with strong eastward flow) such as the Bolt Creek Fire (15,000 acres in September 2022). There is no increasing trend in such fires.
I read this book last week
Snowpack has little correlation with fires in western Washington because such fires typically occur at lower elevations, where snow melts early even in normal years…and again, these fires didn’t happen until late summer anyway.
If easterlies develop, hot/dry weather in late summer would be helpful, but at this time there is no reason to expect unusual summer conditions. El Nino is gone and this summer we will transition to La Nina. In any case, the correlation between El Nino/La Nina and our summer weather is very weak. Furthermore, May has seasonally cool and humid weather.
Importantly, there is no reason to expect the likelihood of unusually strong easterly winds this summer to increase. Do not have.
In fact, Central Europe’s latest pressure forecast for September (a month with strong easterly winds), is for higher than normal pressure offshore, where there is WEAK easterly flow (see below).
And if the front-page article wasn’t scary enough, the Seattle Times has a hyperbolic opinion piece about the wildfire season that’s currently going on everywhere.
It even includes the statement that:
In fact, wildfire season has lasted all year.
Do you know how many wildfires are raging across Washington State and surrounding areas right now? Zero. See the evidence below.
The article notes that there are several fires in Canada, BUT THAT ARE SPECIAL to the Boreal Forest.
For those worried about wildfires, guess what the forecast is going to be in the next few days?
A nice wet shower in western Washington (see below, through Sunday morning)
And then MORE rain is expected in the new week (see a roundup of many Seattle rainfall forecasts).
Finally, today I was sent the most amazing video of the aurora borealis, set to triumphant music (see below). Created by Bart Durbin.
Be prepared to be emotionally affected. Bart did a great job creating this.
