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Angus Productions Inc.

April 23, 2012
firer isk

Fire Risk Potential

Report indicates fire risk from April to July.

Fire can be a useful tool when used appropriately and planned accordingly. However, wildfires can be a disaster to homes, farms/ranches and pastures. Natural disasters are never predictable, but, luckily, in the case of wildfires, previous weather patterns do give producers more of a heads up than normal.

Predicting weather is a tough job, but sometimes understanding those weather predictions can be difficult, too. El Niño and La Niña have profound effects on the weather (though they are factors, not all-inclusive), but what exactly are those results?

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), both phenomena stem from the temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Simply put, El Niño has warmer oceanic temperatures and La Niña has cooler oceanic temperatures.

El Niño's effects show up mostly in the wintertime, with mild winters over western Canada and parts of the northern United States and wet over the southern United States.

La Niña is characterized by drier-than-normal conditions in the Southwest, Southeast and Central Plains in late summer through winter. On the other hand, the Pacific Northwest is generally wetter in the late fall and early winter. Generally, La Niña's winters are warmer than normal in the Southeast and colder than normal in the Northwest.

The National Wildland Significant Fire Potential Outlook, released by the National Interagency Fire Center, is a good tool to use to predict fire hazards for your area. The major factors affecting the outlooks are La Niña/El Niño, drought and fuel dryness. This outlook is for the time period between April through July.

Past weather and drought play a large role in fire risk. It was evident that there were extremes in many areas — flooding in the Midwest and Northwest; severe drought in the Southwest; and dry areas in the Great Plains, Southeast and New England. While past weather conditions were not always cooperative, ocean and atmospheric circulations (which greatly affect the weather) are continuously evolving.

Warming oceanic temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are indicative of the end of a La Niña spell (which played a large role in the severe droughts in 2011). This means for April the report predicted a likelihood of higher-than-normal temperatures across most of the eastern two-thirds of the country, and cooler-than-normal temperatures along the northwest coast and southern Alaska.

The report predicted the fire hazard for the different areas of the United States:


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