Creating a Database for East Wind Events in the Pacific Northwest

During Summer 2024, I was part of the Hollings Preparation program, where I interned with the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Portland, OR. My project focused on fire weather and specifically doing a re-analysis of conditions such as pressure gradients and winds that contributed to the explosive growth of three major wildfires located in both Oregon and Washington in the last eight years. The common factors in each wildfire were the presence of a very strong East Wind Event that significantly affected the acreage burned and speed of the fire. These East Wind Events are triggering, not only for emergency management officials and land management agencies, but the general public as a whole after several devastating fires in the last decade. To this day, the phrase “East Wind Event” brings up significant anxiety and stress to those in the region, and meteorologists are cautious when communicating an “east wind,” and an “East Wind Event.”

The Eagle Creek fire occurred in 2017, near Cascade Locks along the Columbia River Gorge, when a teenager threw an incendiary device off the Eagle Creek hiking trail. This fire burned for three months, and it burned roughly 48,000 acres. The impacts were significant; It harmed local tourism, created debris flows (one of which led to a fatality on the interstate), and led to the closure of many beloved hiking trails.

The second fire is often referred to as Labor Day 2020 and was comprised of multiple fires that burned throughout the state of Oregon. The total acreage is over 1 million and it led to the evacuation of thousands, destruction of many structures, and extremely poor air quality for weeks across the entire region.

The third fire in this study occurred in Washington, the Nakia Creek Fire. It burned almost 2,000 acres. While most of the damage was to the timber industry, the fire jumped the fire lines about 24 hours into the East Wind Event. Fortunately, there were only a few hours left of the strong east winds before the winds slackened. This fortune resulted in the fire coming up just short of dozens to hundreds of homes located in the foothills of eastern Clark County, WA.

The goal of this project is to start creating an easily accessible database of East Wind Events with their associated Sea level pressure gradients, and winds gusts at Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) in forest land, and Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS) at airports across the Pacific Northwest. This information will assist NWS Portland meteorologists as well as incoming Incident Meteorologists, in identifying patterns and thresholds that contribute to the devastating East Wind Events that occur.