Fire season fears grow amid western heat wave

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — Experts are warning that the unprecedented heat wave that has roasted the West during the past two weeks has also set the stage for a potentially perilous wildfire season.

The relentless heat, which has shattered monthly high temperature records, has caused the mountain snowpack to virtually vanish from California’s Sierra Nevadas all the way to the Colorado Rockies. This puts the region in “uncharted territory” as it enters the wildfire season, said Jennifer Kay, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“A whole bunch of warning signs that are flashing at us,” agreed John Abatzoglou, who studies wildfires at the University of California at Merced. This early snowmelt has increased the risk of an earlier and more severe wildfire season, he said. Even high-altitude forests are slated to dry out well before they usually do, making them more vulnerable to bouts of extreme fire-weather conditions during the warm season.

A new study published on March 23 in the journal Environmental Research Letters showed that the trend toward earlier snowmelt in the West — which is expected to worsen due to human-caused climate change — has lead to larger amounts of acreage burned as well as more severe wildfires. Such fires can usher in ecosystem changes that last long after a particular blaze is extinguished.

Kay visited a university snow observing site in the Rockies this week and found only patchy, slushy snow cover that was melting rapidly. There is no precedent for such an early melt out there in at least forty years, she told CNN. And this rapid snow melt started from a historically low snowpack, to begin with.

“The fact that we’re melting out now, before we even have reached what historically has been the peak snow amount on the ground tells you everything you need to know,” she said of wildfire risks.

“I think we really need to move away from thinking about the fire season as being just a summertime concern. When we don’t have snow on the ground, it’s especially a year-round concern,” Kay said.

However, this year truly stands apart, said Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher.

“There doesn’t seem to be a clear time in the past where we had this combination of poor snowpack, extreme heat and then this rapid melting this early in the in the spring,” Schumacher said. This raises wildfire worries but also concerns pertaining to water resources, particularly in the Colorado River Basin, which has been mired in drought for years on end.

Schumacher said he is concerned about the chances for more severe wildfires in the coming months, compared to what would have occurred in a wetter, cooler year. “Earlier melt out of snowpack in the spring correlates strongly to more severe fires occurring in the season to follow, and that’s really where the worry is,” he said, referencing the new study.

Extreme early snowmelt lengthens the fire season by getting it going earlier in the year. “We’re fast-forwarding ourselves towards a fire season,” Abatzoglou said.

There is one significant caveat, which each of the scientists pointed to: the uncertain weather conditions between now and the end of the warm season. While the potential for a particularly dangerous fire season exists, it is not guaranteed, because the weather during the spring and summer months plays a large role in triggering blazes and sustaining them.

Transient weather patterns can significantly raise or lower short-term fire risks, and there is still room for a weather pattern shift that could bring cooler conditions and possibly even a wetter regime to the West. If this happens, it might lessen some of the heightened wildfire risks, although it would not completely ameliorate them.

If the warm pattern that has persisted from the winter into the spring continues, however, the odds of a potentially extreme wildfire season tick up considerably.

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