Fire season expected to be close to average
El Niño and La Niña make fire season in NM harder to predict
New Mexico may be in for a relatively normal fire season, although there is more unpredictability than usual.
Moving from spring into summer, the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Albuquerque is expecting a switch from El Niño to La Niña, opposing climate patterns that have a big impact on weather conditions. Quick switches between the two can create moderate uncertainty in how temperatures, precipitation and wind will react, said Bladen Breitreiter, incident meteorologist.
“I don’t anticipate that we’ll be seeing anything on par with what we saw during our historic fire season back in 2022,” Breitreiter said.
In 2022, New Mexico suffered the largest wildfire in state history: the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire. New Mexico winds aren’t expected to be as strong as in 2022, but there will be more wind than last year.
In 2023, the state had a more moderate fire season than is typical. This year, Breitreiter is expecting a closer to average fire season.In the Southwest, an El Niño weather pattern, such as what developed last year, tends to bring cooler and wetter weather in spring and early summer, which delayed the start of fire season in 2023, said Rich Naden, a fire weather meteorologist for the Southwest Area Coordination Center. Flipping to La Niña means that the weather is expected to warm up and dry out in late May and June, making it likelier that fire season will start on time.
Fire season predictions are
based on analysis of weather conditions, especially snowpack, prior and forecast precipitation, and wind conditions.
Significant snowpack is still holding across portions of the northern mountains, Breitreiter said, and parts of northern New Mexico had above average precipitation during the winter.
But some areas of the state like the eastern plains, which includes towns like Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, Clayton, Roswell and Carlsbad, lost out on precipitation during the winter, which puts those areas at higher risk of wildfires.
For the next week or so, Breitreiter does not anticipate the eastern plains will see much in terms of critical fire weather conditions because the relative humidity — the moisture in the air compared to the total amount that can exist in the air at that temperature — has been a little higher.
The Rio Grande Valley, which stretches from Taos south to El Paso, also had less precipitation over the past few months. The lower precipitation has been more notable in the Middle Rio Grande Valley around Albuquerque and farther south.
“On top of that, we’ve had above-average temperatures. So, drier conditions, above-average temperatures, we’re going to see more fuel availability for burning as we move into May and potentially into June as well,” Breitreiter said.
Fire season in New Mexico can start in late March and usually peaks in April and May when the weather is driest and windiest, then tapers off during the summer monsoon season.
But this year meteorologist believe that monsoon season might start late because of weather patterns in the Southwest region.
“That would allow for some of those more elevated to critical fire weather conditions to continue through June, when we would usually see them start to taper off,” Breitreiter said.The monsoon season may also end earlier than usual, said Naden, because of the La Niña weather pattern.
Whether living in northern New Mexico with a large snowpack or in southern New Mexico with drier conditions, it pays to practice fire safety by not parking on grass, not throwing cigarettes out windows, and abiding by red flag warnings to avoid outdoor burning, according to Breitreiter.
“It only takes one spark and then we end up with what could be a disaster. So, one simple decision could really, really change the outlook there,” Breitreiter said.