Read the National Wildfire Outlook for 2013

National agency: Dry winter, warming trend foretell wildfire danger across West

Two rapidly growing and unseasonably early fires burning in northern California’s wine country and another wind-whipped blaze farther south likely are a harbinger of a nasty summer fire season across the West.  Officials with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise said Wednesday in their first 2013 summer fire outlook that a dry winter and expected warming trend mean the potential for significant fire activity will be above normal on the West Coast, in the Southwest and portions of Idaho and Montana.  A combination of a low-moisture winter and a warming and drying pattern in the West that will increase the fire potential.

In 2012, record-setting fires raged in New Mexico and Oregon, while destructive Colorado blazes torched hundreds of homes amid one of the state’s worst seasons in years.  Like 2012, Colorado experienced some of its first 2013 wildfires in March.  Outside the West, however, much of the U.S. is expected to experience normal fire conditions, with below-normal danger in the South where significant, long-duration rains saturated the landscape.