With hot, dry Idaho summer on the way, meteorologists train to keep firefighters safe
Meteorologists with the National Weather Service from across the country recently spent a week in Boise to participate in a training that will prepare them to work on active fires and other hazardous weather events this year.
Home of the National Interagency Fire Center, Boise is a hub for firefighting efforts. But Idaho itself may be hit with severe fires this year based on climate predictions, according to Robyn Heffernan, National Weather Service fire weather science officer.
About 100 meteorologists came to Boise for the training for incident meteorologists, who assist firefighters with their suppression efforts while also attempting to keep personnel safe.
The week-long training program hosts a mix of new trainees hoping to become incident meteorologists as well as program veterans who must complete the training every three years, Heffernan said.
Representatives from various federal agencies with firefighting teams, like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, attended the week’s sessions as guests and instructors to assist with the training.
Jeff Tonkin, an incident meteorologist based in Eureka, California, told the Idaho Statesman that incident meteorologists have multiple objectives.
“Our tasks are to provide accurate forecasts and weather data information for the goal of suppression by the team and the firefighters,” he said. Fires are mainly driven by wind, so accurate wind forecasts are essential to predicting a fire’s route, he said.
But safety is the key.
“The real goal of this program is to provide safety to the firefighters and getting them out of harm’s way should weather become impactful,” he said.
Between fuels, topography and weather — the three elements that affect fires — weather is “by far the most dynamic,” Heffernan said.
While forecasters always assist firefighters, incident meteorologists will go in person to the scene of a large fire to provide site-specific forecasts, often with weather balloons and Remote Automatic Weather Stations, which can better pinpoint local weather than a regional office.
The supplemental program is volunteer-based, and active meteorologists at local offices must train for roughly three years before becoming certified to be incident meteorologists.
Five meteorologists from Idaho’s Boise and Pocatello Weather Service offices participated in the training, Heffernan added.
Climate impacts, fire season outlook
Scientists say climate change is causing bigger and more intense fires, and extreme blazes have plagued the West in recent years. The effects of climate change have increased the need for the work that incident meteorologists do, Heffernan said.
“If you take the nation as a whole and look at the trend, it is a trend for longer fire seasons, more extreme fire behavior, more impacts when it comes to people and communities and values at risk,” she said. “That’s what we’re seeing overall.”
“There’s definitely a stronger need for incident meteorologists,” Tonkin added.
Data released Tuesday from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows 84% of Idaho, including all of Southern Idaho, is in moderate to extreme drought.
In February, meteorologists predicted that Idaho’s drought conditions will worsen going into the spring and summer. Much of South and East Idaho has below-normal snowpack, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service within the Department of Agriculture. Irrigated agriculture in Idaho largely relies on snowpack to fill the state’s reservoirs and provide adequate water for crops throughout the fall.
Scientists predict that snowpack will decline precipitously in the coming decades, which will likely cause increased drought and further reductions in stream flows throughout Idaho.
Though the Interagency Fire Center is forecasting normal wildland fire potential for Idaho in June, Heffernan said that potential will likely increase when the forecast extends to later in the summer. Dry and warm conditions are forecast for the majority of the summer in Idaho, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We can anticipate that as we get into the latter portions of the summer into early fall, that we’re going to see the red on this map move up into the Idaho area and see some areas of above normal,” she said.
