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Joey
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PostTue Jun 02, 2020 1:08 pm 
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Kim Brown
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PostTue Jun 02, 2020 3:00 pm 
Not surprising, how 2020 has gone so far.

"..living on the east side of the Sierra world be ideal - except for harsher winters and the chance of apocalyptic fires burning the whole area." Bosterson, NWHiker's marketing expert
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MyFootHurts
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PostTue Jun 02, 2020 3:43 pm 
They say EVERY year that this year will be worse than ever. They do the same thing with snow fall too. "We have the lowest snow pack to date! The consequences will be dire!" And then a few months later the snow pack is at or above normal and they then have nothing to say about it.

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cascadetraverser
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PostTue Jun 02, 2020 5:12 pm 
Hmmm. I was just thinking how this spring feels like such a NW typical one. Like last to me. If the college wet pattern lasts through the first part of July hopefully we’ll be alright.

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Slim
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PostWed Jun 03, 2020 8:29 am 
MyFootHurts wrote:
They say EVEY year that this year will be worse than ever. They do the same thing with snow fall too. "We have the lowest snow pack to date! The consequences will be dire!" And then a few months later the snow pack is at or above normal and they then have nothing to say about it.
Exactly! Wash, Rinse, Repeat https://www.nwhikers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8029463

"Lean mean money-making-machines serving fiends"
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thunderhead
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PostWed Jun 03, 2020 11:03 am 
It is time for the yearly reminder that month+ ahead weather forecasts have zero skill, and are statistically indistinguishable from a random number generator. Only the largest sea-surface-temp anomalies have a noticeable impact, and there are no such now. One thing that might be predictable is possibly reduced firefighting because of covid?

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Joe Biden
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 6:32 am 
MyFootHurts wrote:
They say EVERY year that this year will be worse than ever. They do the same thing with snow fall too. "We have the lowest snow pack to date! The consequences will be dire!" And then a few months later the snow pack is at or above normal and they then have nothing to say about it.
This 100%.

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treeswarper
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 6:54 am 
ImTheScientist wrote:
MyFootHurts wrote:
They say EVERY year that this year will be worse than ever. They do the same thing with snow fall too. "We have the lowest snow pack to date! The consequences will be dire!" And then a few months later the snow pack is at or above normal and they then have nothing to say about it.
This 100%.
Yup. Usually it starts about the time budgets are being developed and allocated. Then we have this dire warning again in June. We might have a bad one and we might not. That's just the way it is.

What's especially fun about sock puppets is that you can make each one unique and individual, so that they each have special characters. And they don't have to be human––animals and aliens are great possibilities
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gb
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 7:48 am 
thunderhead wrote:
It is time for the yearly reminder that month+ ahead weather forecasts have zero skill, and are statistically indistinguishable from a random number generator. Only the largest sea-surface-temp anomalies have a noticeable impact, and there are no such now.
This is the thing. But, on average extended outlooks end up being statistically true, most often. Some of this is just based on the fact that the planet is warming and drying in certain areas and hence as compared to the average of the statistical base, it would have to be quite a cool period to beat those old averages on the downside. I think Seattle prior to February 2019 had seen 14 years without a below average temperature month. I saw something like that mentioned in the Seattle NWS Discussion one day perhaps a year ago or so. One thing that is definitely true is that the snowpack and soil moisture from about Easton to Vantage and south to Yakima was and is very meager at least up to about 5000'. Even about April 1st on a north slope near Yakima you could dig down about 2-3" before finding moist soil. That was not normal. By April 1st snowpack on Table Mountain above Ellensburg had risen above the forest line. Interestingly, though, the area east of Chinook Pass had above average rain/snowfall last winter according to a friend of mine who lives in that area. And snowpack at elevation nearer the crest, west of the crest and in the Olympics is near or above average. Cool weather lately will have been helping that situation by slowing melt. Washington Pass snowpack is rather poor as of the highway opening (from telemetry). I often find about 72" of snowpack when the highway first opens.

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jinx'sboy
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 8:12 am 
thunderhead wrote:
It is time for the yearly reminder that month+ ahead weather forecasts have zero skill, and are statistically indistinguishable from a random number generator.
Actually, there are whole bunch of things, besides long range weather forecasting, that go into wildfire predictions. So you cant take a “coin-flip” 30 day WX outlook and draw a straight line over to fire forecasting. The ‘Potential’ map, posted by Joey, is about the probability of a fire start and fire severity - both of which are driven by fuel moistures, both dead and live fuel moisture. Dead fuel measurements are done at hundreds of points around the NW - at all elevations, then correlated to historical trends. The lower the moisture the longer are flame lengths, the more severe, harder to control, faster spreading, producing more brands to carry fire. And a fuel bed more receptive to catching fire. Yes, the 30 or 60 day WX forecasts would figure into it, but the + or - trend in fuels has already set the stage. For the east side of the Cascades, an old co-worker who was an ace fire behavior specialist used to tell me “it is the moisture we get in April/May/June that determines what sort of fire season we’ll have in August and September, not the snowpack”. This is especially true of low and mid elevations. Higher elevation fire seasons are partly driven by snow - as a late melt-off means (usually) less and less time for the fuels to dry out. Fire behavior forecasting is very complicated and not just looking at weather forecasts. Of course they get it wrong, too! 2019 being a great example - we had a dry spring, much like this one, but then had a very cool summer, some atypical summer showers without lightning, and few lightning storms or other ignitions - a very mild fire season that went against forecasts.

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FiresideChats
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 8:13 am 
The Snotel data, especially the comparison plot, is what I trust. In every year that's not 2015, the snow pack at a location melts within a 3 week window. By August I think wildfire is much more predicated on spring and summer rain than the meltout date.

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jinx'sboy
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PostThu Jun 04, 2020 4:58 pm 
To elaborate on the single maps Joey posted: Here’s a link to the National Fire Potential maps and discussion: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive/outlooks/monthly_seasonal_outlook.pdf And the Pacific NW Discussion: https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/content/products/fwx/MonthlySeasonal.pdf Both are dated June 1 and are updated monthly spring thru early fall.

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thunderhead
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PostFri Jun 05, 2020 2:28 pm 
Yes, there are fuel loads and such to consider, but the main player in our fires is weather. The lack of recent rainfall or the presence of high wind... and those cannot be predicted this far out except sometimes in the cases of obscene ocean surface disturbances, which are not around most years.

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