Climate Abyss

Weather and climate issues with John Nielsen-Gammon

Recipe for Wildire


1 Wet summer

1-2 Extreme cold snaps

1 Dry winter

1 Record dry spring

5-10 Hot, dry, and windy spring days

Use first ingredient to produce plenty of summertime plant growth. Produce excess mortality of plants with second ingredient. Withdraw moisture from perennials with third ingredient. Apply fourth ingredient to inhibit spring growth of plants and ensure that the dead plant material stays dry. Finally, just stand back and wait for the standard springtime weather to come around. That way, any fire will spread so quickly that, until the winds die down at night, it’ll be unstoppable.

Whoever was in charge of preparing this year’s wildfire season followed the above recipe very closely. The last I saw, nearly 400,000 acres in Texas had burned so far this year.

As bad as that is, it could be much, much worse. The dry weather across almost all of central Texas means that the wildfire danger is not just confined to western Texas this time. Instead, if the winds pick up, many parts of central and eastern Texas are in danger too.

This is one of those dangers that residents of central and eastern Texas don’t think about very often, mainly because they’ve never seen a bad wildfire. But the possibility gives firefighters and emergency managers nightmares. From San Antonio past Austin, the shrubby, hilly terrain is densely populated, with little or no buffer between the homes and the flammable countryside. If a fire gets going when the winds are blowing more than 30 mph, a major disaster is possible.

The race is on. Will we finally get one or more good, strong squall lines that dump a few inches of rain across the area and moisten things up, bringing the chances of a major event to near zero? Or will a strong low pressure system form along the Red River, with strong, dry winds from the west or southwest sweeping across the state?

The topography of Texas helps a bit. Air spreads out as it flows through the relatively low gap in the mountains across southern Arizona and New Mexico and reaches the flatter parts of Texas. So winds in west Texas tend to be much stronger than those in east Texas. The lower altitude of east Texas also contributes to this, as does the tendency for the west Texas air to be much warmer than the east Texas air. All of this makes major wildfires much less likely in central and east Texas than in west Texas.

But “less likely” doesn’t mean “impossible”. Like most natural disasters, a major fire is inevitable. Maybe not this year, maybe not this decade, but someday. And until it rains, this is one of those rare years when it just might happen.

Categories: Uncategorized

9 Responses

  1. Eric Berger says:

    Good, timely post. Thanks, John.


  2. JCH says:

    Yes, it’s amazingly dry this year. Good thing the speed limit is going to 85 mph. Might have to blow out of here in a big hurry.

  3. adelady says:

    jch, learn from Australia. Don’t wait until you need to run from fire.

    If the forecasters tell you that fire is highly likely tomorrow – go now. Get your photos, your documents, your jewellery, your pets organised. Ring your mum or friends elsewhere and invite yourselves to stay for a day or two.

    And go!

  4. Marco says:

    Jae, what do you think of Archibald’s use of the temperature data of Providence, Rhode Island in a discussion on major droughts more than a thousand miles further south?

    And what do you think of Archibald’s use of a paper on droughts focusing on West-Virginia, which according to the drought map shown in the same post is NOT suffering from any drought?

  5. jae says:

    Marco: You stumped me. I offered no opinion or conclusions. Please enlighten me.

  6. Marco says:

    Jae, I asked you to provide an opinion. Let’s not act stupid here, you wanted to plug a commentary from WUWT.

  7. Jae says:


    Archibald says:

    “So, to predict the onset of de Vries cycle droughts in North America, all we have to know is when the last de Vries cycle started. That was in 1798 at the beginning of the Dalton Minimum. 210 years after 1798 makes 2008, which happens to be the end of Solar Cycle 23 and the beginning of Solar Cycle 24. Solar activity has been quite weak since 2008, so everything is happening on schedule”

    He is evidently using the Rhode Island data as a proxy for the whole Nation. I don’t necessarily agree (or disagree) with this, but if you recall, many Indian tribes in the Southwest also disappeared due to long severe droughts. Archibald is talking about a 200-year cycle. That seems to fit with the extinction of the Anasazis, also:

    Archibalds ideas seem to me to be a lot more reasonable than you claims that mass extinction events were due to CO2–or something.

  8. Marco says:

    Jae, I never claimed CO2 caused mass extinction events (*), I noted significant and rapid warming did.

    Of course, it is also ironic to see you point to the fate of the Ancient Pueblo People, who had to leave their settlements possibly due to a climate change, and argue on another thread that climate change is nothing to worry about.

    Something tells me you don’t even see you contradict yourself…