Benign Wildfire Year in Washington State

Everyone needs some good news this year and in this blog I am going to give it to you.  

We are half-way through the Washington State wildfire season and so far the area burned is far below normal.  We have not had any major fires.

And the latest forecasts suggest that this happy situation will continue.

To illustrate, here is the burned acreage on lands protected by the the Department of Natural Resources (excludes some Federal lands) from January 1 through July 31st.  This year there has only been 678 acres burned, the second lowest during the past decade.  And most of this is just grass fires.
Now some media folks and a few (less than honest) politicians have been saying that this has been a worse than normal fire year so far.  Let me show you how they are "stretching" the truth.  

Here is a plot of the number of fires counted by DNR.   So far we have had 558, which is more than normal.
But this increase has been mainly due to small fires ignited by folks, homebound by COVID, doing a lot of clean up and trash fires, plus a bevy of "recreational" fires.
Currently, there are only two major fires going on, and both are nearly contained (see map below)


We are now in the warmest time of the year for our region, and the most threatening for wildfire.  Fortunately, the forecast models are pretty emphatic that we are going into a much cooler/wetter pattern.

The latest Climate Prediction Center 6-10 day forecast shows below normal temperatures:


And the latest international ensemble (IMME) precipitation forecast for August, September, and October indicates normal conditions over most of the State (and wetter over the NW portion).  The forecast is pretty much the same for August.


Consider the latest UW WRF  7-day precipitation forecast, which brings some rain to the western and northern parts of the State, plus more rain in southern BC (which keeps down the fires there).


Another favorable point is that State's streamflow is near normal, something good for our fishy friends (green colors are in the normal range).

The bottom line is that at this point there is no reason to expect an above-normal wildfire and wildfire smoke season.  In fact, good reason to expect less wildfires and smoke than normal.  One issue to take off your worry list.


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