[pct-l] Fire season not so dire in Pacific NW

[griffin at u.washington.edu (Tom Griffin)]

Good news for those hiking the PCT in the Pacific NW this summer. Because of
our cool and wet spring, the forest service has downgraded much of the fire
potential to "normal." Here  is an article from the Associated Press on this
topic.

Tom Griffin
Seattle
PCT pages: http://staff.washington.edu/griffin/pct.html
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Cool, wet weather alleviates dire forecast for fire season

By CHRISTOPHER SMITH
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOISE, Idaho -- With fresh snow blanketing mountaintops and unseasonably
cool June temperatures around the West, federal forecasters are backing away
from previous predictions of a busier-than-normal fire season.

"Of course we are going to have a fire season, but the large fire danger has
moderated and it's not going to be as dire as we first thought," said Larry
Van Bussum, national fire weather operations coordinator for the National
Weather Service.

The Predictive Services Unit of the federal government's national wildfire
coordination center here is expected to release its latest Western fire
season outlook tomorrow, downgrading previous "above normal" forecasts for
much of the Pacific Northwest and Rockies to "normal."

"It's more like realigning our priorities," said Tom Wordell, wildland fire
analyst with the U.S. Forest Service. "To believe this cool weather will
persist the entire summer season is going to be a reach."

Fire-weather forecasters say the summer wildfire outlook for Washington and
Oregon is being scaled back to normal, with the exception of the northwest
Cascade Range and northeastern Oregon.

In the Great Basin region, most of Nevada now is expected to have a normal
fire season, while the critical danger in the Northern Rockies is expected
primarily in the higher elevations of the Idaho Panhandle, western Montana
and the Salmon and Challis areas of eastern and central Idaho.

Forecasters say their original projections were based on the dry winter
experienced in many parts of the Northwest and Rockies, a trend reversed in
the Southwest, where winter precipitation set records.

The wet spring has eased much of the fire threat, and long-range forecasting
models call for cooler and wetter-than-normal weather through June in the
entire Northwest quadrant of the country, as well as northern California and
western Montana.

"Early in the season, the snowpacks and winter precipitation patterns were
just dreadful," said Heath Hockenberry, National Weather Service fire
program manager. "However, all that outlook can be basically canceled out by
a wet June."

Tuesday, a chilly Pacific storm moved through the interior West, dumping up
to 8 inches of snow in the Wasatch Range of Utah.

It came on the heels of another wild, winterlike blast -- complete with two
tornadoes -- in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin that forced state highway
authorities to put snowplows back into service to clear several inches of
slushy hail and snow from roadways late last week.

"In much of Western Oregon right now, we've already had a month's worth of
rain, so the normal precipitation for June has already fallen," said Oregon
State climatologist George Taylor in Corvallis. "In the Northwest, it's dry
enough every year for fires, but the biggest variable we've seen is the
number of dry lightning storms, which tends to make for a bad fire year."

Precipitation during May and early June has moistened the rotting logs and
fallen timber that fuels catastrophic fires.

Forecasters say continued cool temperatures have helped retain that moisture
into a period when fuel loads would normally be drying out.

Ninety-degree days are frequent in southwestern Idaho by mid-June, but
Boise-area temperatures have been 5 to 10 degrees below normal, and the
trend could challenge the existing record for the latest appearance of the
first 90-degree day of the summer, set July 6, 1953.

"Traditionally, there's a decent, consistent path toward 90-degree weather
that begins in June," Hockenberry said. "But we're definitely not seeing
that."

(c) 2005 Associated Press