Wildfire Season

Above: The smoky skies have made for some interesting sunsets.



Above: An Osceola County Florida firefighter working to put out flames along I-95 at Brevard County-Volusia County line area in thick brush and smoke.



Above: NASA's Aqua satellite detected three large fires burning in east Central Florida on February 28, 2011. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, all three wildfires burn out of control and threaten homes. The largest of the fires is the Iron Horse Fire, burning in south eastern Volusia County, east of Deltona. The 20,000-acre blaze continues to produce dense clouds of smoke. Since this image was made the winds have shifted onshore and the smoke now blankets Central Florida. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

March means wildfire season in Central Florida. Strong winds and tinder-dry conditions in Central Florida near Cape Canaveral have fanned a 20,000-acre blaze that has forced closure of I-95 and US 1 repeatedly this week. This spring promises to be an active Florida fire season due to the very dry winter of 2010-11.



Above: A mid-day shot along US 1 near Oak Hill, Florida.

Dry winters in the Southern U.S. are common when unusually cold water is present in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean (that is La Niña conditions). This occurs because the unusually cold waters act to deflect the jet stream, keeping wintertime storm systems from traveling over the Southern U.S.



Above: Lake Harney, east of Deltona at dusk with fire in the distance from a cell phone camera. Flames and smoke rise in the stiff easterly (onshore) breezes.

La Niña is gradually weakening, but is expected to last through the spring months, meaning that drought conditions will continue into the summer. There is some relief in sight this weekend for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle, where a storm system and associated cold front are expected to bring rains of 1/2 to 1 inch. However, Texas and most of the Florida Peninsula will miss the heaviest rains, and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is predicting much above average chances of dry weather across the Southern U.S. for the remainder of March.



Above: United States drought conditions as of March 1, 2011, showed large regions of drought over the southern tier of states, with extreme drought conditions over portions of Florida. Most of east Central Florida is experiencing severe to extreme drought conditions. Image credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.



Above: From my experience this is approaching the worst drought conditions in the past 2 decades. Our east Deltona lake is virtually gone. Here a Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis) nests about 1,000' from the normal shoreline of our lake in what should be an area of 7-8 feet deep water. The only other time I saw the lake this low was in the spring of 2000 when the lake virtually disappeared.

Today, there have been a few light, fast-moving showers coming in on the long fetch of strong easterly winds off the Atlantic Ocean. . . but not enough to help alleviate drought conditions. These showers are dropping 100ths-of-an-inch of rain or less.

Climatology data indicate that we can expect rains to return around mid-May (or in about 10 weeks).