Between Flyron, FireCapt and Anvilhead amongst others, I appreciate their go-to fastest reference (personally) for Fire weathers forecast’s amongst my beloved home state of California. But it seems to me that the weather reports are bread crumbing off to why the “most terrible fire season ever” has been so slow. May I suggest this new discussion area for it so I can get back to wondering if we are going to have a Santa Ana wind event that could possibly spur some of my awesome fellow co workers bank accounts back into a the Black and possibly avoid the dreaded “Well your off” Daycare duties.
I for one feel that the amount of Augmented Air Assets, CWN’s and Departments readiness saved most of our bacon. Cant beat two Type 2 Ships 20 mins after dispatch. Keep it up Directors, nice call.
Looking forward to thoughts on why our lovely state has enjoyed the benefits of cleaner air, more time for family, and less acres scorched, So far.
Cheers.
I think you have a point that a busy lends itself to a more busy season, while a slow season lends itself to a slower season in terms of available resources. I feel weather has played a large role in a slower season also. It has not been as hot or as windy as it has the last couple of years. We are also not done yet, it is still awful dry out there.
For sure, plenty of station time to be ready. Lots of training and drills. No burn outs or forces to turn moral worse.
Lack of starts and a lack of competition for resources.
Nationally we never hit PL5 so there has always been resources available. At the busiest (to date) there have been only 4 T1 teams committed at a time. The quantity and size of Type 1 LATS and Helicopters and the FS "control’ instead of “managing” fires coupled with early state evolvement on any fire threatening the SRA all added help. But the single biggest reason has been the weather. The stars didn’t aligned in 2022 like they did in 2017, 18, 20 & 21. This year reminds me of a “typical” fire season the first 20yr I was involved in fire. As Woody says
Cheers.
The Climate has ALWAYS Been changing. Ice cores and Mud Sediment tell us the planet has been warmer, colder, dryer, and wetter. Heck all the continents were once connected. The US is the not even the 3rd largest country by population yet, is the leader when it comes to doing what needs to be done to.“clean things up” environmentally. But this site is filled for the most part with FF. FF understand BTU and energy output per unit of measure. Yet, EV’s are thought of, forced upon as efficient and better than fossil fuels. Sure, an EV I’d cleaner to drive. But what does it take to build the EV? How many BTU’s were used to create the EV? Was the most efficient means available to generate the electricity to charge the said EV. Can more be done, ABSOLUTELY. Will America Solve this problem alone, ABSOLUTELY NOT. But being honest and realistic about the problems is what’s needed before solutions are developed.
Perhaps i’m not alone in feeling the urge to loose my collective you-know-what each time i hear “unpredictable” unprecedented" so I’ve been looking into paleo-climate & past planetary events and found this helpful .pdf among other pieces of data. These are just some of the events that have occurred in the current “quiet period” that our climate currently finds itself in. I found this data to be helpful… \m/
Extreme-Climate-Weather-and-Meteorological-Events-Sept.-2017.pdf (761.4 KB)
Nailed it!
PERSPECTIVE
This and an understanding of History is what has dammed human kind since the beginning of time.
The BIG Blow-up of 1910 lead to one of the single worst timber and landscape management plans in American History.
The same piece of central California burns approx 200,000 acres every 14-20yr in almost the same footprint. Yet “managers” think they can tame the beast when the final acreage of 1977, 1996, 2008, 2016 was about the same.
Learning history, understanding other perspective instead of their perception will go a long way to correcting the ills of society.
I believe there should be no question at this point whether or not humans have accelerated a natural planetary warming trend. Of all our human tendencies I consider denial one of the least useful.
I am neither a climatologist, nor a firefighter, but I do not disbelieve the data:
I’m not a climate denier. But I think a lot of context gets lost when people in the media jump right to blaming climate change without considering everything else that has changed in the wildfire environment over the same time period as global warming. Bringing it back to California fire season, I think it’s a good reminder that climate systems operate at a whole different scale, and that the variability of climate effects is somewhere the science is really struggling. We could have a slow decade or even two in California wildfires but it wouldn’t really prove anything about the bigger picture state of the global climate.
The climate has been changing here, ever since this ROCK started to cool down the first time. It has been and will be changing as long as it will exist. With and without the help of it’s inhabitants.
I guess I am struggling to see your point… a decade or two of slow fire seasons would certainly change things. It is not like we have never had large and damaging fires… we have always had large fires in this state… it is just that in the last decade we have seen a shift to more damaging fires and fires doing things that they never did before. In Lake County you could always count the fires slowing down at night and if it was less than 1500 acres… it was basically done. 2014 that all started to change. We saw lower RH recovery at night by 10% and a more prevalent second burn period where a very dry air mass would settle over the area.
The average temps at the Jarbo Gap Raws showed an average of 2 degrees warmer each night and 7-10% drop in RH.
That has a cumulative effect on the fuel and it availability to contribute to fire spread.
I live at 2200 feet. I used my AC on average about three times a summer. We are now squarely in the thermal belt with our over night temps often hovering near 70.
Every winter Stellers Jays would show up around January and leave in April. They like the higher elevations. We did not see one of them until this winter… Why? Lack of snow cover. They did not need to come down here to find food.
Those are visible… palpable and notable changes.
There are people who have spent their whole lives studying paleo climate science. It is not a new science. If NASA, DOD and even the oil companies support the human effects on the climate I am sure that a bunch of folks who got their degrees on line can at least educate themselves.
You cannot oversell fuel reduction as a science. If anything lacks long term study and science it would be that field. I keep hearing people say that they want to “reset the landscape” and all I can see for miles is the same landscape. It is what it wants to be based on the climate and environment.
Try reading something… anything before you say " na aa".
Try The West Without Water for a starter.
Yeah, my point was clunky, I think. I was trying to say even if climate plus drought is giving us unwinnable firefights like Dixie, you can still have a season where fuels don’t get critical until late August, or you never get the conditions for fires to escape IA in July. It doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real, just that its working at different scales, in hard-to-predict patterns.
I think we end up being in closer agreement on most things than you assume. I agree that fuels work isn’t going to solve the problem, just wrote a piece about it. Ground Truth: The Limits of Scale - Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network
Have to add my two cents, the climate folks and weather folks are using models and information that wasn’t available that many years ago. The models only predict an outcome based on the information provided. I love the weather guru’s on this site, they all have a point that makes you think. The sun is entering a early hot, active cycle not seen for many years. The CO2, is at a very low level influencing plant growth that at a point might end us.
The severity of the fire season is highly correlated to two things, live fuel moisture and fuel loading. An above average fire season typically looks something like this; below average winter precipitation, accompanied by above average spring precipitation prior to the live fuels coming out of dormancy. This leads to a situation where you have low live fuel moisture with a large crop of fine dead fuels, combine those conditions with high fuel loading and boom you have a busy fire season.
When someone immediately jumps to climate change is causing more severe fire seasons, it tells me one of two things. Either that person knows nothing about fire or they are pushing an agenda.
And then you have that year, the past cured wild oats wilt instead of burn, three feet uphill from a motorhome burning for thirty minutes before first engines arrive.
. Well said
And who said it was going to be a slow year, I think we might have Dirty August starting
Why else you think we restarted this thread? The other option to jumpstart the season was to go on a 4-day bender, and I’m too old for that.
It’s going to be interesting getting resources, you look at the morning reports for both North & South Ops they are running on low nearly every day.