In a large portion of the Central and Southern U.S. today the air is dry, the winds are strong and the land and vegetation are bone-dry. The U.S. Drought Monitor says the region is in “exceptional” drought.
All this has led to an explosive growth of wildfires across the Southwest and central and southern High Plains. Now a renewed blast of dust-filled blowing winds has raised the fire danger levels to historic highs.
NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has issued an “extremely critical” fire weather outlook across much of New Mexico, western Texas, western Oklahoma, southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado. There is an expectation of winds gusting 50 to 70 mph overlapping with very low humidity levels in the 3 to 10 percent range, according to Weather.com.
One front behind another comes through
The continuing lack of precipitation, combined with an increasing sun angle and frequent warm conditions “has allowed vegetation across the region to be very dry,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Brett Edwards. “This, coupled with high winds, will allow any fire to become widespread and a threat to life and property,” he said.
Quite a few towns have already experienced close calls with large fires on Monday and Tuesday. An evacuation was ordered on Tuesday in Oakwood, Oklahoma, as the Rhea Fire approached the town. This fire has been blazing for several days and has burned over 200,000 acres.
This threat is expected to remain through Wednesday for communities in eastern Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and western and northern Texas, despite cooler conditions. However, “the highest threat will be confined to the Oklahoma Panhandle region down through eastern New Mexico,” Edwards said.
Looking toward Thursday and Friday, a storm developing over the southwestern United States will start to kick up winds in Arizona and New Mexico. The powerful winds associated with the storm will again threaten to turn any spark into a raging inferno. And like the last front, the air will be full of blowing dust.
Because of the large amounts of both airborne dust and smoke from wildfires, expect slowed and dangerous traffic conditions, airline delays and poor air quality.
Making sense of what is happening
The Washington Post points to an excellent post by Weather Underground’s Bob Henson. Henson, citing how the fire danger in Oklahoma is becoming more extreme, says it all comes down to two issues – climate change and a change in land use.
“Echoing a global trend that’s associated with human-produced climate change, Oklahoma has seen signs of a ramp-up in hydrologic extremes over the past few years. May 2015 was the state’s wettest single month on record, and 2015 was its wettest year. “The November-December 2015 period was the wettest on record as well, and the sixth warmest. So the growing season extended into winter to some extent that year,” said [Oklahoma state climatologist Gary McManus]. The result was an unusually lush landscape going into the first part of 2016 that dried out quickly in the weeks leading up to the Anderson Creek fire.”
This same scenario was repeated to some extent in 2017. Added to the weather extremes is the changes being seen in the state’s landscape. There are now vast swaths of red cedar, which used to only grow on rocky terrain that was less prone to wildfires. The sappy red cedar, while having a great smell, light up like a kerosene torch.
“A state brochure noted that infestations of at least 50 red cedars per acre grew fourfold in the second half of the 20th century. It added: “The effects that the exploding populations of red cedar are having on the state might be compared to the soil erosion that occurred during the ‘Dust Bowl’ era of the 1930s-40s. It is becoming a problem in almost all counties, and will take years and millions of dollars to bring the spread of cedars under control.”
