by Unusually warm temperatures, dry grass and a sudden windy front combined to create the conditions for the devastating wildfires that swept across Texas this week.
The winds that sent wildfires across the Texas Panhandle struck at the perfect time of day for destruction, “like a hurricane making landfall at high tide,” said Texas State Climatologist John Nielson-Gammon. Hot, dry temperatures — the kind that could fuel climate change — helped create conditions to put out those fires, he said.
On Monday, temperatures in some parts of the dry northern region of the state reached the mid-80s, and several wildfires began to burn.
The next day, Arctic air descended from the north in a bitterly cold can. Winds on both sides of that front — which topped 50 mph at times — sent flames roaming through dormant grass, Nielsen-Gammon said. The cold front arrived in the late afternoon, when wind speeds were higher, and changed directions as it passed through, maximizing how quickly the fire spread.
It is not clear how the fires started.
“The timing of the weather during the day was probably the worst it could have been,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “If you’re going to have a wildfire outbreak, this is the kind of weather pattern that’s going to do it.”
The fires swept across the landscape so quickly that firefighters had little chance of containing them.
“Those fires were moving very fast, all things considered, for a wildfire. We’ve seen speeds in the 5-10 mph range,” said Christian Rangel, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Amarillo. “The strong winds helped to push these people out and achieve an uncontrolled situation.”
The terrain of the region also played a role, with open ground helping the fires to take hold and spread quickly and making it difficult to fight the blazes.
Despite being mostly flat, the area is characterized by “broken terrain” of sand and grass that can be difficult to access, said Luke Kanclerz, head of the forecast services department at Texas A&M Forest Service. So, once the fires tore across the plains, it was difficult to contain them quickly.
“A fire moving at about 5 miles an hour may not sound very fast but when you have a large fire front and you are trying to contain a large area, it far outweighs the efforts to contain the fire prevention,” said Kanclerz.
The Texas Panhandle is no stranger to gusty winds or roller-coaster temperature drops. But the fires wouldn’t have the same chance of taking off otherwise because of unseasonably warm temperatures and more likely dry conditions due to climate change.
“This particular event would not have been as devastating if it had happened a few years ago during the same time,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “These high temperatures can happen earlier in the season and it happens when the grasses are normally dormant, so there is a lot of dry fuel available.”
John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of California, Merced, said wind was the biggest factor in the size of the fires, which were covering nearly 1 million acres, according to the federal wildfire tracking website, Inciweb.
“This is primarily a wind-driven fire,” Abatsoglou said, adding that the role of climate change was “more subtle than generally thought.”
Abatzoglou said the wind first came from the west to spread the fires in the shape of ellipses on a map, then it moved about 90 degrees and started pushing those lines to the south.
Abatsoglou said there is little solid evidence of how climate change is shifting wind speeds.
Temperatures in the Borger area, near where the fires originated, reached 85 degrees F on Monday, according to National Weather Service data.
“We set records at many of our climate sites,” Rangel said of the Amarillo forecast area, adding that relative humidity measures in many parts of the state were at or below 20% and the landscape was ready to burn. .
Parts of the Texas Panhandle are extremely dry, according to the National Drought Monitor, but the landscape is not suffering from severe drought. In fact, it received a healthy dose of rain in late summer and fall, which helped grass grow tall.
The above-normal growth increased the risk of wildfires during what is considered a dormant season in Texas for grasses, which typically runs through the winter to about mid-April.
Nielsen-Gammon said the heat hit early in the season and before the vegetation could green up and was less likely to burn.
“We didn’t need a drought to get dry fuels this time,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “We’re in the dormant season for grass, there’s still dead grass lying around.”
Across the western United States, fire weather is becoming more frequent. The nonprofit group Climate Central calculated how the number of fire weather days changed in communities across the United States from 1973 to 2022, using weather station data and measurements of temperature, wind and relative humidity.
By the end of the group’s five-year study period, some parts of Texas, including the High Plains and Panhandle, were seeing twice the number of fire weather days, according to Climate Central. The High Plains now sees more than a month of additional fire weather days, the report says.
Texas faces a complicated wildfire future, according to a report on the state’s future with extreme weather authored by Nielsen-Gammon and her colleagues.
However, researchers expect dry conditions to prolong the wildfire season, especially in places like east Texas, where conditions are less dry. In the future, wildfire risk may increase more slowly in west Texas and the Panhandle, as plants struggle to grow in a drier climate.
Nielsen-Gammon said he is concerned that fast-moving wildfires could become more common in central and east Texas as conditions become drier, putting the Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth areas at risk. bigger.
“There is a greater risk of loss of life and it would be in places where people are not used to wildfires,” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
