Early recognition of drought potential resulting in enhanced interagency collaboration during the 2010/11 Texas wildfire season

Drought in Texas is influenced by global scale climate variations. Episodic droughts in Texas during the past century have occurred with a frequency of roughly 20 years. The latest Texas drought episode began in the late 1990s and continued through the 2011 spring green-up season.

The 2010 tropical season was relatively dry for much of Texas and the few tropical systems that did impact the state resulted in abnormally heavy fine fuel loads in West Texas. The transition from El Niño to La Niña by early December 2010 increased confidence in the onset of enhanced drought during the upcoming Texas fire season. By January 2011, National Weather Service fire weather forecasters in West Texas were predicting a higher frequency of warm, dry and windy weather patterns that result in critical fire weather conditions.

The early recognition in late 2010 of the likelihood of enhanced drought and high fire danger led to unprecedented coordination among the State of Texas, the NWS and various fire agencies. This collaboration included to the establishment of multiagency Incident Command Posts and the advance deployment of resources that were able to quickly respond to the numerous rapidly spreading wildfires that occurred.

This presentation will include a review of the Texas climate record that shows the 2010/11 drought lies within the normal climate signal, but the acute drought signal was particularly strong. The weather patterns of 2010/2011 will be compared with those of 2005/06 that facilitated the rapid growth and spread of major fires in Texas. Finally, inter-agency collaboration to mitigate the deadly fire potential will be described.