Reviewing 2024 Western US Extreme Heat and Wildfire Risk using the NOAA High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR)

To date, there have been several instances of extreme heat events and destructive wildfires across the western half of the contiguous United States in 2024. These include a long-duration intense heat wave during most of July, along with multiple wildfires across portions of New Mexico, Oregon, and California throughout the summer months. The frequency, duration, and magnitude of these events continue to increase over time, leading to concerns about long-term stability and resilience of critical infrastructure including the interconnected electrical grid. This has led to recent research funding and development of the NSF U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid (WIRED Global Center). Our contribution to the WIRED Global Center is the evaluation and development of research-based dataset tools to integrate numerous observational, numerical weather prediction, land surface, and electrical grid information.

We have leveraged previous research and operational archival efforts involving the NOAA High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) weather prediction model to create a percentile-focused dataset for extreme heat and wildfire-related quantities from 2016-2023. The work presented details the construction of the percentiles archive and evaluates periods of the 2024 summer and fire seasons. Included are reviews of the frequency, duration, and magnitude of the extreme heat and critical fire danger events that took place in 2024 relative to this short-term historical record. Further evaluation of these events are shown in the context of available utility power grid information, with a focus on frequency and occurrence of conditions in 2024 that resulted in concerns regarding electrical grid performance.