Friday/Saturday looks really bad. All timer situation with all of the large fires burning, dry lightning tomorrow, and multiple days of dry line + strong winds
Lowest snowpack on record during the 2026 season + Warmest winter in state history = Utah!
I used the PyreCast.org model to look at potential spread for the Cottonwood Fire. If it makes steady progress to north today and tmrw, it could be in alignment to run North Creek (next major drainage to the north) in similar fashion to how it took out the Beaver River drainage on Tuesday.
Barring rain, it has fuels available to exceed 200k acres across very broken terrain. Also, the current northern edge is a 10 year old burn scar full of snags and jackstrawed dead and down.
PyreCast doesn’t do a very good job of capturing terrain influence (fires rarely run up-drainage in the model), but it is good for looking at fuel continuity coupled with upcoming weather.
If you want to check out PyreCast, it runs best in Chrome. The model is similar to FSPro, in that it is probabilistic and runs thousands of scenarios based upon historic weather conditions. It is seeded by VIIRS heat, running spread models on any area that is hot in the most recent VIIRS runs. This is problematic when the fire is really cooking, because yesterday’s VIIRS had huge over-mapping from picking up heat in the column…
I wrote a bit about using PyreCast on 2023 Klamath Fires (it overestimated the potential vs what actually happened). In general, it’s just another tool for visualizing data and making educated guesses as to how things may pan out.
I made a video about the potential for the Cottonwood Fire last night, here (sorry for click-baity title, but that’s how YouTube works…)
