To hear and read the MSM reports about this fire, you’d think that the entire states of Colorado and Wyoming were ablaze. Meanwhile, the usual paid advocates are already wailing about how the fires are supposedly exacerbated by “climate change”. NASA has released MODIS imagery that puts the size of fire in perspective:
Colorado’s High Park Fire continues to expand and generate a lot of smoke visible on NASA satellite imagery. NASA’s Terra satellite showed winds from the west-southwest blowing the smoke to the north-northeast and into Wyoming and southwestern Nebraska on June 19th, 2012.
The High Park Fire is located approximately 15 miles west of Fort Collins, Colorado, and is now 55 percent contained. To date, 189 homes have been lost, according to the U.S. Forest Service. More than 1,900 people are currently battling the fire, and about 1.3 million gallons of water have been dropped on it. As of June 20, the fire has consumed 65,738 acres, up from the previous day’s total area of 59,500.
On June 19, 2012, at 1840 UTC (2:40 p.m. EDT) the light brown colored smoke and the heat signatures from the fires were detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies onboard NASA’s Terra satellite.
Inciweb reports that pre-evacuation notices were issued to a number of areas. The U.S. Forest Service reported that fire was spotted “across the Poudre Canyon on the northwest corner of the fire triggered additional evacuations for the Glacier View subdivision and additional pre-evacuation notices west to Glen Echo Resort.” For a complete list of those areas and more information and firefighting updates, visit the Inciweb website: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2904/.
For an unlabeled, high-resolution version of this image, visit: http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=Colorado.A2012171.1840.250m.jpg.
=============================================================
Some interesting stats from SOS Forests Western Institute for Study of the Environment:
The number of wildfires has been declining since the early 1980’s. That may be an artifact of the counting system. Many small fires started by multiple lightning strikes in the same vicinity are counted as one fire today, while they may have been counted as many individual fires in prior decades.
Total Number of Wildfires, 1960-2009. Chart by W.I.S.E.
In addition, delays in rapid response to small fires may result in those fires merging, and then they are counted as one fire. That can happen to large fires that merge, as well. There are many name changes and mergers of fires during the fire season, which confounds the fire count. Wildfires don’t happen in test tubes in a laboratory, and so the counting system is not as accurate and precise as some scientific studies might lead you to believe.
Another possible explanation for the decreasing number of wildfires is that human-caused and/or lightning-ignited fires are fewer today than 30 years ago. We have no data to either support or refute those hypotheses.
The average size of wildfires in 2009 was 75 acres. That is more than 2008 (66 acres per wildfire), but less than 2005, 2006, and 2007 when the average wildfire size was 131 acres, 103 acres, and 113 acres per fire, respectively.
Average fire size is not a useful statistic, though, because the distribution (number of fires by acreage class) is skewed by a few very large fires (greater than 20,000 acres). The NIFC does not report the distribution, but it is more or less in a “reverse-J” (negative exponential) shape, with many small fires, fewer medium-sized fires, and a handful of megafires out in the tail. The average fire size is also dependent on the total count of wildfires, which may be biased by inaccuracies and imprecision in the counting system, as mentioned above. We present the following chart anyway, because we have the annual data and it was easy to make the graph.
Annual Average Wildfire Size, 1960-2009. Chart by W.I.S.E.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Domestic grazers (sheep, goats, cattle, horses) and putative “wild” grazers (deer, elk, antelope, etc.) can recycle biomass to some degree, and even overgraze areas. But coniferous forests are largely impervious to grazers and browsers.
Our vast public forests are where the worst fires arise. They need human tending with technologies such as chainsaws, skidders, and prescribed fire in stands people have prepared to receive fire.
Traditional forests on this continent and others were human tended with selective burning of patches and individual trees. That gave rise to anthropogenic mosaics of berry fields, root crop prairies, fiber farms, and nut and fruit orchards.
The open and parklike ponderosa and pinyon pine forests of Colorado were deliberate nut orchards maintained for thousands of years by man. Trees were widely separated so that the frequent anthropogenic fires and less frequent lightning fires did not carry from crown to crown. Today we mow our orchards. Then set fire was used to keep the ground between trees free of brush and thickets of young trees. In both case the goal was and is to protect the sources of food and fiber.
We moderns have philosophically and practically separated ourselves from “nature”. We have entrusted high priests of “science” to theologize a toxic relationship: humans as pathogens and nature as a vengeful goddess. That’s one reason purveyors of climate alarmism can gain traction with their a-scientific Chicken Little-ism. People have been taught from childhood to accept such nonsense.
But the fact is that humans, by biological imperative, are the caretakers of nature. We cannot divorce ourselves from nature any more than we can divorce our own bodies. We have to tend our landscapes or they and we will suffer fatal consequences.
– MJM
Thank you for that! Many don’t like people citing wiki’s site, but, I think it probably get’s more right than it does wrong, so an added thanks for vetting it . I hope you rated the page as only 5 people have.
Laurie, thank you for the tip on the ratings. I gave it 5 stars across the board. I also however found an interesting criticism of it at:
http://climateprediction.net/science/pubs/nature_StateOfFear.pdf
which folks might like to read and react to, though we’re straying a bit from the original CO fire topic???
– MJM
there are some things that we need pointed out:
(based on an early life in western montana)
first the statistics lie like a rug. the feds count every fire that they become aware of. there are a terriffic number of fires that are anywhere from dinner plate sized (they smolder for about a week or so and then the aircraft spot the smoke for about three days running and they send a couple of guys out to it and those guys put it out with the urination technique).
then there are the big ones that can run up to a million acres. supression techniques on those as a practical matter run from speculation on whether its going to jump the river or shall we pray for early snow.
thats really big country out there. there are counties that have 392,000 acres in the public domain and that is 92% of the county with a county population of about 800 souls. (and there’s five more of those to the west before you get to idaho).
as far as the cause of a fire, the following questions should be asked. did the fire start near a road or a garbage dump? if so its probably man caused. if it started 90 miles from civilization then its probably lightning caused. most of them no matter what the greenies say to the news papers say are lightning caused. the majority of fires happen in the late summer towards the end of august when the ground has had time to dry out the brush and bushes and other stuff.
back in the day USFS used to sell the timber (under strict control) to the lumber mills. as a part of the sale they required a considerable milage of roads to be built which turned out to be very efficient fire breaks. part of the sale profits went to reforestation. that is planting pine trees (about six inches long with one branch) by the hundreds of thousands. they started that during the 1930’s and are still doing it. the trees that i planted during the 1960’s were cut down and turned into houses in bakersfield ca in the 1990’s.
And for the greenies that want to scream “you didn’t cut down a tree did you, how terrible!!!!!” i will remind them that they mow their lawns don’t they. its just a different crop and growing cycle.
C
Common Sense says:
June 22, 2012 at 10:56 pm
quite a number of years ago ~20 they had a fire in montana that went past 280,000 acres with a whoop and a hollar. i looked on google to see if the home town was burned to the ground and the closest that one was was one mountain ridge to the east.
in 1910 there was a fire that started about 20 miles east of the montana idaho line and went almost to wallace idaho (or so they say) it was called the 1910 burn. in 1960 you could see the remains of it on the mountainsides. it looked like a lawn with about one huge tree per acre sticking up out of it. when you got up into it, the “lawn” was pine about 30″ through the butt. the trees sticking up above the lawn were all “lightining rods” and we had about two fires a week from the middle of august until the first snow in that area.
C
there is something that anthony and the gang should be interested in.
during the sixties (and i think that it is still in practice) every forest service station, lookout tower and wide place in the road had a “weather station”. it was a small area that was fenced in out in the forest with the “instruments” in a little classic white “house” on about a 3′ stand. inside the house was a barometer, a thermometer a wet bulb thermometer and a couple of other things. on the ground was the important instrument, to them, was a set of precision “sticks” that they very carefully weighed with a very precision scale inside of the house. there were two sets of sticks one on the ground itself and the other on a wire stand about 8″ off the ground. the difference in weights gave them the “forest floor fuel moisture content”. they wrote all of that stuff down on a chart and sent the charts to the main offices in courdelane. as far as i could tell this stuff was all over the united states and there might be a huge pile of data somewhere.
C
It’s my understanding that is was these “Great Fires” that led to ‘innovative’ new building materials in the metropolitan areas . . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fires
Anyone have a thumbnail calcualtion of how many BTU’s have been released? (that could have been used for kwh generation)
An additional question to Laurie’s on BTUs released in forest fires. Does anyone have a figure/reference handy for the amount of biomass burned annually in forest fires on the average? And or the amount of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that is produced? I once managed to come up with some figures but I’ve lost track of how/where I did it.
Another fire broke out a little while ago (just after noon) near the resort town of Estes park, and Rocky mountain National park. Luckily it is close to the high park fire burn area so fire resources were quickly available.
Temps in the Metro foot hills 99 deg F and 8% relative humidity. Good news is winds are low 5 mph gusting to 8 right now in the Boulder area.
This will be a long fire season for the high country.
Larry