Wetter April, May may help reduce fire threats
Good snowpack also a positive factor
It might seem like New Mexico is headed for a bad wildfire season, but there’s a lot of snow in the mountains and it’s still early.
While warmer weather has prompted New Mexicans to shed layers of clothing and enjoy the sunshine, nearrecord-high temperatures and windy conditions are also melting mountain snow quickly and increasing the threat of forest fires.
“Right now, the snowpack looks pretty good, but we lose snow every day,” said Andy Church, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque.
Still, weather prognosticators are expecting help from Mother Nature as New Mexico moves into fire season.
“The month so far has been dry, but the models are trending (toward wetter) weather for April, and there’s agreement that May could be above average,” Church said.
Bill King, the acting fire staff officer for both the Santa Fe and Carson national forests, said high winds cause moisture in the mountains to evaporate instead of soaking into the ground.
Fortunately, much of northern New Mexico has a big snowpack this year heading into spring. The Rio Chama basin, a collection of all the water sources that feed the Rio Chama, had a snowpack that was 156 percent of normal as of March 10, according to data from the NWS. The Cimarron River basin was 114 percent of normal, while the Jemez and Pecos river basins were 96 percent and 85 percent of normal, respectively.
The recent winds and heat, though, has reduced snowpack over the past several weeks. Church said 10 percent to 15 percent of the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range has been lost in the past 10 days. More snow is going to melt in the coming week as northern New Mexico is going to see temperatures 15-20 degrees above average. Church said
those temperatures are going to be more akin to mid-May average highs. “It’s pretty extraordinary,” he said.
The melted snow is causing rivers to rise. The Rio Grande has risen about 9 inches in the past three days, Church said, while the Rio Chama has risen about 4 inches. The Pecos River is rising steadily, too, but the NWS keeps only hard data on the other two rivers.
But rising rivers don’t bode well for fire season. According to Julie Anne Overton, a spokeswoman for the Santa Fe National Forest, melting snow means conditions are going to be drier as we head further into fire season.
“It’s not a good thing that we’re getting that kind of meltoff that early,” she said.
The Jemez Ranger District southwest of Santa Fe, which is the southern-most district in the Santa Fe National Forest, is usually the first to dry out and is therefore often the first to spark, King said. To the north, there’s a prescribed burn planned near the community of Mesa Poleo, south of Coyote in Rio Arriba County, that could be set as early as Tuesday if the Forest Service deems conditions are suitable.
Drought is the first thing King looks at when preparing for a fire season. He said a wet 2016 got New Mexico out of a severe drought, but fire danger could still be high.
King said the monsoon season, which usually starts by early July, is looking “normal.”
King also looks at “fine fuel,” which he said is at “normal to above normal” amounts in the forests. Fine fuel in a forest is any wood product that falls off a tree and any stick that’s about a ¼-inch in diameter that can feed a fire and cause it to spread.
It also doesn’t help that the fuel doesn’t go away easily, he said. “Stuff doesn’t rot here, so we get buildups of fuel in these forests,” said Bill Armstrong, a fuel specialist with the Santa Fe National Forest.
Fine fuels are usually taken care of with prescribed burns, but Overton said the Forest Service will also let a wildfire take care of some of the fuels that crews were planning on burning anyway. A lot of factors go into making that kind of decision, she said.
“We now have the authority to use wildfires to accomplish management objectives on the land,” she said. “Before, the Forest Service suppressed all wildfire but, as science progressed, we began to understand that these forests actually need fire. It may be a good idea to let wildfire just get rid of that fine fuel.”
Church said above-average moisture last year caused other potential fire fuels like grass and weeds to grow, but Armstrong said those are really only a problem in range fires and not so much in the forest.
Although it’s hard to predict such things, King said that, starting in June, there could be heavy lightning, which is the only natural cause of forest fires.
Sometimes downed power lines can start a forest fire — the giant 2011 Las Conchas Fire, at the time the largest recorded fire in state history, the Tres Lagunas Fire north of Pecos and the Thompson Ridge Fire near Jemez Springs, both in 2013, were sparked by power lines — but King said that’s still considered a manmade cause.