It’s spring training season! I’m not talking about baseball, though (at least not here - plenty of baseball talk in my home!). The National Weather Service’s Incident Meteorologists gather in the spring for their annual “Continuity of Excellence Exercise” - their spring training for the coming fire season. Known as “IMETs,” these meteorologists are like the Rangers to the Army or the SEALS to the Navy - they are elite, highly trained, and deployed to the most intense situations. IMETs work on site at wildfires to provide weather support to firefighting crews and emergency responders, often staying for weeks and providing nearly continuous weather information.
This year, they invited me to come teach them about climate - specifically, about communicating climate change. They wanted to know how to answer the questions they get about climate change. Did it cause this fire? Is it going to keep making fire seasons worse?
Because climate and fires go together like pitching and catching. Fire is a normal part of many ecosystems, but when they burn too hot, too explosively, then they harm the vegetation they are meant to help and endanger human and animal lives. And big, explosive fires are becoming more common. There are a lot of factors contributing to the increasing wildfire dangers across the country, and climate is a big one of them. (Another big one is the decades of fire suppression strategies that let volatile fuels build up instead of burning off periodically, the equivalent of adding more powder to the keg before it inevitably ignites.) Wildland fires do more than threaten the people and property in their paths, though that’s certainly a big concern itself. They also toss smoke in the air that can travel thousands of miles, causing health problems for people under the plume.
I have never been an IMET - my physical condition is too fragile to tolerate the weeks of camping, hauling equipment, and sleeping on the ground. The IMETs welcomed me with open arms, anyway. I spent almost a full day teaching rounds of IMETs about climate. The next day, they asked me to help their IMETs practice giving weather briefings over radio. After a lightning-round lesson on how to use the radios myself, I listened to IMET trainees give their spot forecasts and probed them with questions to make the forecasts even sharper, to adapt their message to a listener who doesn’t know what they do about weather. It’s communication training all over again, just in a different training exercise.
IMETs find themselves in traumatic situations and need to learn how to ask for help and to decompress after a deployment. We also gathered at the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, which honors fallen wildland firefighters and supporting crews. We talked about the resources available to support meteorologists who have worked during traumatic situations (think killer tornadoes, devastating hurricanes, floods, and fires). The group’s evening activities included karaoke, axe throwing, and a smash room. If you’ve met me at a LauraPalooza, you might already know that I am drawn to karaoke like a magnet to steel. It turns out that a smash room also is an effective and satisfying stress release!
My confidence is high that the IMETs will apply what they learned about climate communication the next time they’re asked about the links between fires and climate. As a teacher, that is one of the most rewarding parts of the job - to see what we teach put in action by our learners. I’m grateful to the IMETs for widening their circle to include me and widening their perspective to make the connections between climate, weather, and on-the-ground impacts.
Fire Weather Season
When the ground is dry, winds high, and temperatures warm enough to help the relative humidity plummet, it’s fire weather season - no matter what the calendar says. That said, fire weather is more common at certain times of year in certain areas.
Grassland wildfires are more common in the Plains in the early spring and late fall, when grasses are crispy brown. By contrast, grass and shrub fires in Florida often peak from early spring into early summer. Forest fires are more common in the West in the summer to fall dry season. In the forested Great Lakes, Northeast, and Southeast, fire season has a double peak in both the spring and fall. Alaska and western Canada see a peak burn season in the heart of summer, often dumping smoke into the central and eastern United States in an active fire season.
Fire Weather Watch and Red Flag Warning
Fire weather watches and warnings are issued by the National Weather Service when certain conditions are forecasted to be met. Winds must reach 25 mph or greater, either as sustained winds or frequent gusts, relative humidity must fall to 15% or lower, and both of these must occur together for at least 3 hours. Or, fire weather warnings can come out if dry thunderstorms (with less than one tenth of an inch of rain) are expected to cover at least 15% of the area. Either way, the fuel conditions on the ground also have to be deemed critical, a piece of the puzzle that land management agencies contribute to the National Weather Service as a part of their fire weather watch and warning decisions. (Meteorologists don’t assess the fuel conditions themselves - we leave that to the experts!)
The National Weather Service issues a Fire Weather Watch when gusty winds and low humidity, or dry lightning, combined with volatile fuels all are possible in the next day or two. In theory, not every Fire Weather Watch will materialize to a high fire risk, but in practice, meteorologists are often reluctant to raise a Fire Weather Watch unless they have high confidence of the conditions coming.
When fire weather conditions are imminent, it’s time for a Red Flag Warning. The label “red flag warning” is not terribly straightforward, unfortunately. Nowhere in the warning’s name does it even say the word “fire”! It’s a legacy of a century ago, when rangers and observers on towers hoisted literal red flags to alert the surrounding area to volatile fire conditions. There have been some recent discussions about renaming the warnings for fire weather, but with a century of doing it one way, changing it to something else is a difficult, layered decision.
On Red Flag Warning days, it’s important to be especially careful with sparks and flames. Certainly all outdoor fires should be avoided, as should tossing cigarette/smoking butts out of a car (often the source of roadside scorches). Matches, embers, and other glowing-hot materials should be doused in water and cool to the touch before disposal - if they must be lit at all. Even the spark of a trailer chain striking gravel behind a piece of farm equipment or the hot exhaust from an ATV running through brush can be enough to start a fire.
Humans are often the source of a wildfire, and that’s usually through careless or inadvertent choices rather than intent. (The 2017 Sawmill Fire in Arizona was famously sparked by a couple’s baby gender reveal, in which a man fired a gun at an explosive target that immediately ignited the grass and spread. A Red Flag Warning had been in effect.) Fires can also be sparked by downed power lines (the source of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California).
One of the most common non-human causes of wildfires is lightning, especially the dry lightning more common in the West. Even if the thunderstorm has a little rain, the shower is sometimes not enough to douse the flames sparked by lightning’s intense heat on tinder-dry vegetation - and sometimes, the lightning strikes outside of where the rain is falling.
An Ounce of Prevention: Prescribed Burns
In Little House on the Prairie, Pa and other settlers were spooked by a grass fire possibly set by the nearby Osage tribe. While they feared a malicious intent, the Osage almost certainly set the fires for a far more beneficial reason. Many ecologies benefit from occasional fires. In grassland areas like southeast Kansas, springtime controlled fires remove the choking cover of dead grass and allow fresh green grass to grow, while also managing pesky shrubs that can overgrow to choke off trails, spread burrs and thorns that make it unsafe for livestock to feed or wander, or become volatile and flammable themselves. It was common practice among Indigenous populations to routinely set fires to reset the ground cover as a part of keeping the landscape healthy.
The same was true in the landscapes of California, where pre-settler Indigenous tribes managed the land with a careful balance of intentional burns to keep the forest healthy. (Check out the podcast The Big Burn for a great overview of managing California wildfires, lessons that apply across the country.) When fire suppression became the land management policy in the early 1900s, volatile underbrush grew beneath majestic old tree growth, becoming so overgrown that wildfires would quickly grow out of control. Instead of coaxing seeds out of the towering trees, the fires scorched them and torched them. The system grew out of balance.
Farmers and forest managers increasingly use prescribed burns to again restore balance to the landscapes. Humans have a flight-or-fight instinct around fires, compounded by years of hearing the message that all fires are bad. Out-of-control fires are often devastating, but controlled burns are an important tool in the firefighting toolbox. They also keep communities safe, as they did around the town of Borger, Texas, during the Texas panhandle wildfires ignited in late February of this year (2024).
Prescribed fires renew the connection between humans and the landscapes around them, highlighting how important each is to the health of the other.
This Month(ish) in Wilder Weather History
April 2, 1889: A prairie fire, masked by a dust storm, threatened the young Almanzo and Laura’s homestead north of De Smet, South Dakota. Widespread prairie fires in the eastern Dakotas on April 1-2, 1889, burned a half million to a million acres, destroying numerous buildings and burning into or near several eastern Dakota towns. A dry spring and summer of 1888 and mild winter in 1888-1889 left the prairie covered in cured grasses. Winds described as “hurricane force” - reportedly 60 to 80 mph - whipped small fires into conflagrations.
Very interesting article, Barb. We were volunteers for a national park in Wales' some years ago and were trained in case we were needed to help manage the controlled burning of heather. Since then, we have tended to question the conservation of a "traditional" grouse moor and farming environment because of the ecological harm this has done the UK over many centuries (increasing chances of bad flooding being one example). However, I can see how this could is very important in reducing the "powder keg" as you describe—and it is probably more important in a country like the US which has a more continental climate and parts of which get much hotter and drier than the UK. Funnily enough, a couple of days ago, I was looking at the math behind axe throwing!🤣 The axe must loop through one or more complete circles to hit the board with the correct orientation and this is dependent on the distance you stand from the board. Glad you had a good time with the IMETs!😊