DENVER — Nothing is 100 percent when it comes to weather, but the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University expects this season’s wildfire risk should be lower than it was in 2018.
“Right now, with our much above normal snowpack, we’re feeling much better than last year,” Service Climatologist and Drought Specialist Peter Goble said.
Colorado’s current snowpack ranges from 128 percent to 159 percent of average. The San Juans are even seeing the best snowpack in over 10 years, according to Goble. While the added snow from the March bomb cyclone helped, he clarified the biggest question when it comes to the wildfire season is the speed the snow melts.
“Slower snowmelt helps the wildfire danger because there’s snow on the ground later in the year. There’s less time for the soil to get dry,” Goble said. “Basically, less of a window for bad fires to develop.”
Conditions created a bigger window for wildfires in years past.
“The perfect ingredients for a bad wildfire season are low snowpack and a warm spring,” Goble said. “A lot of our worst fires in history like the Hayman Fire, Spring Creek, or 416 fire last year came on the heels of bad snow years and happened in a hot dry June -- that lull between spring moisture and summer monsoon moisture.”
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With a steady snowmelt expected from April to June this year, the state would need quite the dry spell for wildfire danger to turn on us, according to the Colorado Climate Center.
“For our risk to elevate we would expect to see a prolonged period of warm, dry weather in May, June, and even into early July,” Goble said. “The catalyst for those types of fires would need to be some sort of dry, windy event. A thunderstorm that doesn’t produce much rainfall but does produce a lot of lightning.”
He explained the Climate Center does not predict that dry spell to happen. While conditions can always change, the seasonal forecast favors wetter than average conditions to continue.
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