PROJECTION: In Alaska, the Interior and Kenai could be busiest firefighting areas.
BOISE, Idaho -- A new wildland fire forecast issued Friday eases much of the threat of catastrophic blazes this summer in Alaska, the Southwest, the West Coast and the central Rockies.
But federal land managers say that if record-setting cool and wet weather trends abruptly reverse across a large portion of the West later this summer, they'll be scrambling to deploy enough equipment and firefighters.
"If things change rapidly and the whole West starts burning at once, we could go from zero to 60," said U.S. Forest Service fire meteorologist Chuck Maxwell of the National Predictive Services Group, the forecasting arm of the Interagency Fire Center based here.
The analysts and meteorologists from various federal agencies anticipate fire potential for much of the West will be near-normal to above-normal through September, a decreased threat from earlier forecasts because of heavy spring precipitation in much of the region.
The busiest firefighting areas this summer should be Interior Alaska and the western Kenai Peninsula; timbered mountains in eastern Washington, Idaho, western Montana and northern Wyoming; and low-elevation rangelands in Nevada, southern Idaho, southeastern and western Utah, northwest and southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and southwest Texas.
The core of the fire season in the interior West has been pushed back from its normal late June start to late July and could continue through early fall rather than the usual decrease in September, according to the new forecast.
Several long-range weather predictions used by fire forecasters show above-normal precipitation could persist through early August across the Great Basin and lower elevations of the Southwest and northern Rockies.
Firefighting crews and equipment are usually deployed in the South and Southwest at the onset of the fire season in May and June, then are moved westward and to the north as those sections of the West dry out and burn later in summer and early fall.
But the Southwest monsoon season that normally douses fire danger in Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas by early July is forecast to be weaker than average or delayed this year.
If the monsoons don't come and the Southwest starts burning at the same time fires break out in parts of the Great Basin, Northwest and Rockies, "we could have serious resource competition" for available manpower and equipment, Maxwell said.
"Our season here in the Southwest normally ends in about four weeks, but given the strange weather we've had, it's going to depend on how things pan out later this summer," he said.
What worries fire managers is the abnormally high grass and brush growth caused by a wet winter in the Southwest, Great Basin and southern California.
"If that grass crop fully cures out, they are going to be perched for some very large and significant fire growth," said Forest Service wildland fire analyst Tom Wordell, chairman of the Predictive Services Group.
