West Rough Wildfire Season Ahead With Building Drought

While wildfires are inevitable in the West during the summer, this year the season has the potential to be worse than average.

Drought, which began last summer, become significantly worse over many areas of the West this winter. The drought is showing few signs of improvement this spring.

Only portions of Wyoming and Colorado to the central High Plains have had some moisture-rich storms of late.

Long-term indications are that these storms will break off in the weeks ahead and are not a sign of wetter times through the summer. This year's drought will shift farther west, compared to last year, which focused from the Plains to the Midwest.

According to Expert Senior Meteorologist Paul Pastelok, head of AccuWeather.com's Long Range Forecasting Department, "The latest indications are that the core of heat and drought for the summer of 2013 will focus from the High Plains to California and will expand into the Northwest and the northern Rockies."

The region is likely to have many critical Fire Weather days, which are defined by the National Weather Service as days in which the relative humidity is at or below 15 percent, winds are 20 mph or higher and the fire danger is rated at a high or extreme level.

"As the summer progresses, we believe thunderstorms will begin to fire over the Southwest, associated with the monsoon, but moisture may be limited moving farther north to a point over the West," Pastelok said.

While the storms will provide a source of moisture to a small fraction of the region, lightning strikes from the storms will ignite wildfires. Many of the storms will not bring significant rainfall to a broad area.

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