A counterintuitive recipe for wildfires is brewing across drought-stricken Western states: a cold front.Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscriptionGet exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.Forecasters expect the large cold front to develop in the Pacific Northwest on Thursday then push southeast into the Intermountain West, creating dry lightning along the storm’s leading edge.The lightning could spark fires, and powerful winds throughout the weekend could spread any new blazes while exacerbating others already burning.
“We have high risk for lightning moving across southern and eastern areas today and tomorrow, followed by several days of strong winds,” Basil Newmerzhycky, a forecaster for the Great Basin Coordination Center, said Wednesday in an online briefing.The Salt Lake City-based center organizes firefighting resources for the Intermountain West, a region that includes parts of Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.“Friday into the weekend, overall fire danger is very high to extreme.
Several of our fires are already showing extreme fire behavior,” he added.Forecasters expect a strong windstorm beginning Friday in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.“A lot of the West is going to be very flammable during this period, with very low vegetation moisture, very dry fuel, essentially, and a lot of wind,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said Monday in a briefing.
“I am concerned.” Swain said the windstorm could persist through Sunday in many places.“It’s widespread, it’s going to be long in duration, and it’s going to be occurring at an unusual time of year for there to be long-duration widespread wind events, which is summer, during fire season and during a significant drought,” Swain said.In some regions along the coast of Oregon and Washington and to the west of the Cascade mountains, the front is expected to produce significant rainfall....