Talk Fire Weather

Fire weather forecasters occupy a strange position: they issue a product, and thousands of people change what they do because of it. Burn permits get suspended. Utilities cut power to whole neighborhoods. Fire agencies staff extra engines and stage them at high-risk locations. Land managers cancel prescribed burns they have waited two years to conduct. All of that turns on a forecast of humidity and wind.

This option puts you in a room with the person who makes that call.

Finding a Fire Weather Expert

• Your local National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office. Every office has fire weather responsibility for its area and a designated fire weather program leader. NWS offices do public outreach regularly and are used to hosting visitors and doing virtual talks.
• An Incident Meteorologist (IMET). These are NWS forecasters specially trained to deploy to large wildfires and forecast from a trailer at incident base. There are relatively few nationally, so if one is available to you, take the meeting.
• State forestry or federal agency fire weather staff, including fire behavior analysts and predictive services meteorologists at Geographic Area Coordination Centers.
• A broadcast meteorologist at a local TV station, especially in fire-prone regions where they cover red flag days routinely.
• A university atmospheric science department, if there is one near you.

Fire Weather Concerns in Your Area

Go in already knowing the vocabulary from Req 5a so you can ask real questions instead of definitions.

Topics worth covering:

• Which weather element drives fire behavior most where you live — wind, humidity, drought, or lightning. The answer differs sharply by region.
• Named local wind events. Many regions have them, and they are usually the reason the worst fires happen: Santa Ana and Diablo winds in California, Chinook winds along the Front Range, foehn and downslope wind events in many mountain areas, and gap winds through terrain constrictions. Ask what yours is called and what sets it up.
• Dry thunderstorms and lightning outbreaks, and how the office forecasts them.
• Drought indices such as the Keetch-Byram Drought Index or Energy Release Component, and how the office uses them.
• Inversions and mixing height — why a fire behaves calmly in the morning and explodes when the inversion breaks, and where smoke will go.
• Humidity recovery overnight, which determines whether crews get a working window at dawn.
• How forecasts get to firefighters, including spot forecasts requested for a specific fire and how an IMET operates on an incident.

Typical Fire Seasons in Your Area

Ask when your area burns and — more interestingly — why then. Fire season is set by when vegetation cures, when precipitation stops, when winds arrive, and when people are out on the landscape. Many regions have two distinct seasons: a spring season before green-up and a late-summer or autumn season after fuels dry out. Ask whether your season has been shifting or lengthening, what the forecaster watches to know it has begun, and what a bad season looks like compared to a normal one.

Fire Weather Watch vs. Red Flag Warning

This is the specific pair the requirement names, so make sure you can explain both precisely.

Both products are issued by the National Weather Service in coordination with land management agencies, and both require two ingredients together: critical fuel conditions, determined by the land management agencies, plus critical weather conditions, determined by the NWS forecaster. Dry, windy weather over green, wet fuels does not produce either product.

Two details are worth carrying into your counselor discussion:

• A Red Flag Warning does not have to be preceded by a Watch. If the situation develops quickly, the office can go straight to a warning.
• The specific thresholds vary by state and by NWS office. Criteria are set in annual operating plans coordinated between the NWS and land management agencies in each state, so the humidity and wind numbers that trigger a warning in Colorado are not the ones used in Georgia. A typical western threshold pairs relative humidity at or below roughly 15 percent with sustained winds or frequent gusts around 25 mph, but you should ask for your office’s actual criteria — and getting those specific numbers is one of the best things you can bring back from this meeting.

Other triggers your forecaster may mention include the first significant lightning after a hot dry period (which can justify a warning regardless of humidity) and a dry cold frontal passage bringing an abrupt wind shift with little or no rain.

Following Up With Your Counselor

Write your notes up the same day, organized around the three required topics: local fire weather concerns, typical fire seasons, and the Watch/Warning distinction with your area’s actual criteria. Then discuss it with your counselor, and connect it back to the fire environment triangle from Req 5a — weather is the leg that changes hour to hour, and this option is where you learn who watches it.

Whichever option you chose, Requirement 9 was about your own area right now. The next requirement goes the other direction: back into history, to a fire that changed the profession.