SPOKANE, Wash. — Nearly 700,000 acres burned across Washington during this year’s fire season. That’s about three and a half times the size of all five New York City boroughs.
The National Weather Service says the combination of an early start to the fire season, a lack of snowpack and a lack of precipitation led to a fire season the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in the past 55 years.
According to NWS, this year’s fire season produced the third most acres burned in the Spokane area in one year since 1970.
Looking forward, the NWS says there are a variety of factors that we could see in the coming months that can potentially impact how much damage we see during fire weather next year, especially with a strong El Nino potentially affecting our winter.
“Because the temperatures do skew warmer, the precipitation that we get frequently falls as rain rather than snow and mountain snow, making it hard to build a durable mountain snowpack,” said Valerie Thaler, lead meteorologist at NWS.
NWS says even though we may see warmer temperatures and less snow this winter, that doesn’t spell disaster for next year’s fire season.
The true markers will be the temperatures and amount of precipitation happening early next summer.
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