La Niña raises threat of winter wildfires

Dry conditions exist in mid-South, Plains

OKLAHOMA CITY — Conditions are ripe for winter wildfires from the midSouth through the Great Plains thanks to a combination of weather factors, including the climate phenomenon known as La Nina, that have left a lot of dry growth.

In addition to the La Nina, an occasional cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that affects global weather and leaves the nation’s midsection drier than normal in winter, a wet spring led to heavy growth of vegetation that a mild summer didn’t kill off.

A dry November increased drought conditions in states including Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Texas, said Oklahoma’s state climatologist, Gary McManus.

McManus compared the potential scenario to that in March, when wildfires in northwestern Oklahoma, southwestern Kansas and the Texas Panhandle scorched more than 2,000 square miles, left six people dead and killed thousands of head of livestock.

“What we see is this La Nina pattern, a cooling of the waters off the coast of South America, and what this means is above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation,” most likely from December through February or early March, he said, adding that precipitation won’t help dormant vegetation now.

“Even if we get rain and snow right now, it won’t turn anything green,” McManus said, noting that drought in the region is spreading and intensifying.

The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map, released last week, shows extreme drought conditions in more than a dozen counties in western Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma, where none existed a week earlier.

Much of the remainder of the western half of Arkan- sas is in severe drought, as is southeastern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas, in addition to northern Louisiana and southern Missouri.

“We are kind of seeing the epicenter of this drought originate in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma and moving westward,” potentially as far as New Mexico, said Todd Lindley, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Norman, Okla.

In western Arkansas, fires in the Ouachita and the Ozark national forests began two weeks ago and burned a total of 4 square miles, according to Tracy Farley, a spokeswoman for the two forests.

“It’s dramatically dry earlier in the season,” which typically would not begin experiencing such weather until January, Lindley said.

He said it’s very similar to the weather pattern last year that created the conditions for the large wildfires that began March 6 in northwestern Oklahoma because of downed power lines and eventually burned for more than a week, charring more than 1,200 square miles in Oklahoma and southwestern Kansas.

Stanley Barby, who owns Bar B Ranch near Beaver in the Oklahoma Panhandle, said the fires burned 33,000 acres of his 50,000-acre ranch. He said the ranch is still recovering from the loss of pastures, fences, barns, three houses and some cattle, and that there is no way to prepare. “Mother Nature controls it, you just take it one day at a time, that’s just a part of being a rancher and a farmer, we just accept it,” Barby said.

The potential of a large wildfire outbreak is scary, said Mark Goeller, state fire management chief of Oklahoma Forestry Services. “We’ve been really watching closely for the past two months,” he said. “We are just in a preparedness mode.”