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Forest fire scientist Tony Westerling’s work on the relationship between a changing climate and wildfire suggests that early spring onset is a key predictor of bad fire seasons. With a warming climate leading routinely to earlier spring these days, climate change is therefore implicated in bigger, badder fire seasons (though forest management practices play a major role, especially here in the Southwest making attribution a hard problem).
After talking to Tony today for a story on these questions, I set out to find the best weather station to answer the “early onset” question in the Whitewater-Baldy fire zone. And boy howdy did I find one.
Up at the 9,000 foot level in Catron County, the NRCS Silver Creek Divide SNOTEL site has been faithfully reporting snowpack and weather conditions since Oct. 1, 1978. Until last week, anyway, when an NRCS crew made a beeline down from Albuquerque to grab what they could – radio, solar panels, data logger, batteries, snow depth and temperature sensors – as the fire approached.
Wayne Sleep, who led the rescue mission, said they won’t know for a while whether the fire burned over the site. But before Sleep’s visit, the Silver Creek Divide site recorded the kind of early spring situation Westerling is talking about:
Silver Creek Divide SNOTEL, 2011-12
The light blue line is the average years’ snowpack. The dark blue line is this year. After a nice start, especially in December, the storm track shut out the Gila, with very little precipitation after the first of the year. Then in March, it warmed quickly and the snow disappeared in a hurry. It was gone by April 11, six weeks early.
Now, the forest around it is burning down.
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at jfleck@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3916
