Ingredients for Fire Weather

A few days ago, there was quite a bit of chatter over social media over the threat of fire weather in Oklahoma. So what exactly is fire weather and how do we predict it?

So what is fire weather? Is it a Biblical depiction of fiery precipitation falling from the sky? No. Fire weather is simply referred to as the weather conditions conducive for wildfire development. There are meteorologists who specialize in forecasting environments capable of producing fire weather.

So how are fire weather conditions created? Thankfully, we live in a region of the US that is not too prone to fire weather, outside of some rare cases in the summer. In order to have fire weather, there must be certain ingredients, some of which are downright obvious.

Ingredient number one is dry air. This is a bit obvious because you can ask Sid, the sloth from Ice Age, a question or two about building a fire in the rain; it simply doesn’t work out.

You must have extremely dry air in place in order to get conditions conducive for fire weather. Another ingredient is wind. Fire weather favors windy environments because the wind can fan the flames and spread them far, creating a wildfire.

The last ingredient for fire weather is simply a spark. This can come in the form of dry lightning, which is lightning from a low precipitation thunderstorm. More obvious sparks for wildfires are from humans. The simple flicking of a cigarette butt out the car window can create a wildfire, as well as unattended campfires.