Wildfires

Once again, in my geography course we tinkered around with some pretty cool software (much like we did the other day with "Stop Disasters"). This week, however, we took a look at some software that actually deals with the "real world" (not that Stop Disasters is not "real world," it just does not depict actual events happening in the real world). The program we were using this time around was called ArcMap which is Geographic Information System (GIS) that utilizes data collected from a plethora of agencies (both government and private). This data ranges anywhere from reported earthquakes to floods to wildfires; the latter is what perked my interest the most.

As I am sure you have heard, Colorado was recently hit by a series of wildfires from June to July this year. This burned over 200,000 acres of land, more than 600 homes, and resulted in millions of dollars in damage (Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/9k7kqqp). One of the causes of the fires was no doubt from extremely dry conditions (from drought the winter before) as well as high temperatures before the wildfires broke out. This history of wildfires interested me, so I decided to do a little research into them.

First, I looked up what wildfires were currently going on the U.S. as of now. I found that, unsurprisingly, the majority of wildfires (at least of now) are occurring in the Northwestern U.S.; no longer in Colorado, but in Utah, Wyoming, and especially Idaho (as seen by the map below).

Taking into account how the Colorado fires took place, I decided to also look into past reports of drought as well as rainfall in that area over the past few months. What I found was what I expected. Over the past few months (from June to forecasts going into October), it has been quite dry in many areas where wildfires are currently active (as seen by the maps below: June to August on the left and August to October on the right):

I am sure this is not really any shock to some well-versed meteorologist, but I just found it interested. I hope you did as well!