6/16/2011 9:58:00 PM
No signs of monsoon to help halt wildfires 
David Kadlubowski/The Associated PressA fire crew from Telluride, Colo., works to contain the Wallow Fire Tuesday outside of Alpine.
David Kadlubowski/The Associated Press

A fire crew from Telluride, Colo., works to contain the Wallow Fire Tuesday 

outside of Alpine. 



Joanna Dodder Nellans
The Daily Courier


Fire experts say the largest fire in Arizona's modern history is likely to burn until the monsoon puts it out, but weather officials said this week they don't see any hint of an early monsoon in the forecast.

Arizona needs hotter, calmer days to draw in the monsoon and put out the 487,016-acre Wallow fire burning in the White Mountains. As the land warms up, air rises and ocean air moves in.

But that's not happening, weather experts from the University of Arizona and National Weather Service said during an online monsoon and climate briefing Wednesday. Prescott has seen only two days so far this month that broke into the 90s.

What is happening is a lot of strong wind in Arizona, and it's continuing later than the usual months of April and May. 

"This wind is really the story," said Mike Crimmins, a climate professor at the UofA. "The Wallow Fire is a wind-driven fire event."

The jet stream tracking along Arizona's northern border is "giving us wind event after wind event after wind event," Crimmins said. The red-flag winds are forecast to continue this weekend across much of Arizona.

"The fires probably will burn until the rains, so it has real implications," Crimmins said.

Other large fires burning in Arizona include the 184,198-acre Horseshoe Two fire in southeast Arizona and the 68,078-acre Murphy Complex near Tubac, both on the Coronado National Forest.

"It's probably going to be one of those fire seasons that people talk about a long time," said Don Falk of the UofA School of Natural Resources and Environment.

Signs of the monsoon are good and bad, so they basically cancel each other out right now, said Glen Sampson, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Tucson. The Pacific Ocean is cooler than average, and that's a good sign. It's warmer than usual in the Great Plains, and that's also a good sign for an early monsoon, which usually means more rain than usual, he said.

However, "until the trough moves out of the Western U.S., getting the monsoon started will be difficult," Sampson said. Heavy snowpack in the Rockies could be fighting the exit of the trough and inhibiting high pressure, he said.

"Basically, that snow has to melt," he said. But a rapid melt would bring severe flooding, too.

The Sierra Madres of Mexico, where the monsoon arrives before Arizona, continue to suffer from severe wildfires. Like the Southwestern U.S., those mountains are suffering from long-term drought and below-average precipitation this year. 

Prescott received 3.83 inches of precipitation at the Sundog measuring site in January through May, or 57.5 percent of the 113-year average.

It's much worse in southeast Arizona. The southeast corner of Cochise County, for example, has received only 12 percent of its average precipitation so far this year.



Climate change and wildfires



The 2011 wildfires are consistent with climate change projections of longer wildfire seasons, Falk said. 

While it's not as dry as 2002 when the Rodeo-Chediski fire set the previous size record for Arizona, the drought has continued since then.

Arizona's average temperatures already have increased in recent decades, and it's going to get warmer. 

Citing projections for a warming climate - at least 4-5 degrees warmer by 2059 and 8-10 degrees by 2099 - Falk said wildfire seasons will continue to get longer as snowpack continues to melt sooner.

The mixed conifer of the White Mountains might not return after the Wallow fire, he said.

While the Wallow fire is the largest in Arizona's modern history, it's probably not the largest in history, Falk said.

Low-intensity wildfires burned across large landscapes of the Southwest in pre-settlement times. However, they were much lower in intensity than the Wallow fire because people had not been suppressing wildfires for decades and letting woody vegetation build up.

Falk pointed to the 88,835-acre Miller fire burning in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness Area as a healthy, low-intensity fire because fire officials have been managing wildfires there since the 1970s instead of extinguishing them. Part of the reason is because mechanical equipment is not allowed in wilderness areas.

There aren't any houses in wilderness areas, either.

Land use is the "elephant in the room," Falk said. Fire managers are forced to extinguish even healthy wildfires because more and more people are building homes in the forests.

"We have very poor land use control in the U.S.," Falk said.

In the Prescott Basin, the 1872 Mining Law led miners to patent lands that now have turned into hundreds of private inholdings with homes.

On the bright side, the Forest Service and cooperators are turning to landscape-scale forest restoration projects, Falk said.

These projects thin out brush and small-diameter trees and help reduce unnatural, catastrophic wildfires.