Fire risk rated high

BOISE – There may be patches of snow still in the Sierras and a lush grass crop growing in the Great Basin, but a federal forecast released Monday says above-normal temperatures this summer across the West will boost wildfire potential.

The latest national fire outlook by federal land management agencies predicts increasing fire danger across the western U.S., with the exception of Alaska, where the potential is below-normal due to persistent showers this spring and summer.

July is considered a critical month for the fire season in the interior West. If the current trend of drier-than-normal precipitation and hotter-than-normal temperatures continues, the growth of grassy vegetation from two successive moist springs could quickly dry out and create the potential for large, fast-moving range fires.

“The big wildcard in July is how soon the monsoons come into the Southwest,” said Larry Van Bussum, national fire weather operations manager for the National Weather Service. “The monsoons are a blessing for the Southwest because they get a lot of rain, but for the Great Basin and the Rockies, those monsoons spark a lot of thunderstorms with lightning, though not necessarily a lot of rain.”

The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise reported 321 new fires across the U.S. on Monday. There were eight large, active fires in Arizona, while California had seven, Utah had four and Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico each had two. A fire is classified as “large” if it burns more than 100 acres in timber or 300 acres in grass.

The weather outlook through mid-August calls for warmer-than-normal temperatures across the western U.S., as far east as the Mississippi River.

The multiagency National Predictive Services Group, which prepares the forecast, says the greatest fire danger in the Pacific Northwest comes from dry, dead trees and vegetation in the Klamath Basin of Oregon and along the border of Idaho, Oregon and Washington through Hells Canyon.