HikeArizona.COM

The endless chatter of weather.

Just under 1.75 inches in Payson of rain this morning in my rain gauge.. will check tonight for total from the storm.

2.19 at my end of town and looks like at least 18' inches of snow at Forest Lakes. Verde lakes are full so I expect more water releases from them. I have noted water flowing in the spillway at Blue Ridge (ok SRP, C. Cragin).

Not sure why but this came to mind as I was reading through this thread earlier. https://youtu.be/42WNHGr1jGI

I-10 between US191 and Lordsburg NM is closed again - 4th time in a week! They have got to get that stretch of dust under control. The 110 mile detour through Safford is a mess for the town and the travelers. On the bright side, our Park is full every time this happens.

chumley wrote:Not sure why but this came to mind as I was reading through this thread earlier. https://youtu.be/42WNHGr1jGI

Office Space is a great movie. Directed by Mike Judge, who also made that documentary about the US--Idiocracy.

I drove through a hail storm in downtown Phoenix today!

@johnlp It's been raining for the last two days in North Phoenix and I love it!

cactuscat wrote:I-10 between US191 and Lordsburg NM is closed again - 4th time in a week! They have got to get that stretch of dust under control.

I suspect that won't happen until the next ice age. (No, not the next animated film. )

I also remember the Schultz Fire in 2010 after that really wet El Nino winter. Does anyone else remember that?

Ended up with just under 2.5 inches in Payson..

Jim_H wrote:I also remember the Schultz Fire in 2010 after that really wet El Nino winter. Does anyone else remember that?

I said it before, I'll say it again: you can't generalize ecological patterns from a single fire. There are fires every year. The big question is how large an area burned?

Here's the total acreage of wildfires (all causes but not including prescribed burns) in Arizona for the last 10 years from the National Interagency Fire Center:

2016 - 308425
2015 - 160152
2014 - 205199
2013 - 105218
2012 - 216090
2011 - 1016428
2010 - 76318
2009 - 263358
2008 - 85496
2007 - 101318

2010 actually had the fewest acres burned of any year in the last 10 in Arizona. 2011 was the biggest year--a dry year following a wet year, like a mentioned above, raising the fire risk.

One thing I also remember, was digging in something like 10 feet of snow on the western side of the Peaks that March of 2010. Then, the east side of the Peaks burned off with that fire in late June of 2010. The day it happened I was hiking up to the Cirque, and there were still big patches of snow with lots of running water and greenery. I'm sure most Flagstaff people were thinking of how fire risk was low that year, just a week before, but we had the relatively small Hardy Fire as well that June, just a day or two before the Schultz. I remember the Hardy Fire, too. I remember Little America being evaucated, as well as most of the Continental area of town. Pepperidge Farm remembers things, but I don't ask for things in return the way the malevolent Pepperidge Farm does. Anyway, I'm sure if you talked to most people who remember the Hardy and the Schultz, that was a bad year in the Flagstaff area for fire, despite the wet winter. It was pretty close to home, and I know some like Jake were probably emotional, even a little, over it. I know it was a little difficult to watch, but I had predicted it a mere 2 years before in my description for the Water Line Trail/ Road.

Acreage burned is not a very reliable statistic to base any conclusion on (except the statistic for "acreage burned"-- It's 100% accurate there! ). There are many, many factors that go into how much land fires burn beyond how much rain or snow fell in a particular area.

As for the NIFC stats by state, that's also not really relevant since the state boundaries cover forest woodlands, high desert scrub, grasslands, low desert and probably a handful of other zones. All of which react differently to both wet winters and fire.

chumley wrote:Acreage burned is not a very reliable statistic to base any conclusion on (except the statistic for "acreage burned"-- It's 100% accurate there! ). There are many, many factors that go into how much land fires burn beyond how much rain or snow fell in a particular area.

As for the NIFC stats by state, that's also not really relevant since the state boundaries cover forest woodlands, high desert scrub, grasslands, low desert and probably a handful of other zones. All of which react differently to both wet winters and fire.

What? That's a pretty incoherent argument. If we're not going to use acreage burned, what measure should we use if we want to say something about the relationship between precipitation and fire? Number of fires isn't great because most fire ignitions are due to people, and most stay small and don't spread and are therefore of little consequence ecologically. Fire intensity is difficult to measure. That's why acreage burned is the key indicator that ecologists use to measure fire seasons, and even if it's not perfect, scientists (like in all those papers I linked to that I'm sure no one read) can find a lot of meaningful patterns in the area burned. If you look in google scholars, you can find over 3,000 papers that use the terms "area burned" and "fire ecology."

And of course there are many factors that influence fire behavior. But Jim is basically arguing that wet winters make for big fire seasons in northern Arizona, and that is false.

As for Arizona having a lot of habitats, this paper (http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui ... sequence=1) shows pretty clearly that fires in Arizona tend to occur in wooded habitats at higher elevations, mainly above the Mogollon Rim and in the Sky Islands. So, the statistics on total acreage burned mostly reflect wooded habitats, not desertscrub, which has a low probability of fire in general. I already said that wet winters can increase the likelihood of fire in lower elevations of Arizona, so I'm not changing my tune on that.

And do you really think that Arizona is too small to draw any conclusions about fires from? It's 70 million acres. There are hundreds of fires large and small every year. Over 100,000 acres burn most years. If you think that's too small a sample size to extrapolate from, you should write a letter to some of the journals whose articles I linked to and tell them that they need to retract a lot of published papers.

Yes.

I'm not sure which question I'm replying to, but I stand by my reply!

chumley wrote:Yes.

I'm not sure which question I'm replying to, but I stand by my reply!

You can lead a horse to water...

This

This is nearly a month old, but I hadn't seen it previously and it has some excellent information about reservoir water levels, snowpack, and runoff from previous years.

https://www.srpnet.com/newsroom/releases/021017.aspx

... the Verde snowpack is currently about 140 percent of normal while the Salt is 76 percent of normal as the recent dry and warmer weather has already prompted some of the lower snow to melt ... the Verde River release means the normally dry Salt River will be flowing through the Valley the rest of the runoff season.

SRP’s current stream flow forecast is projecting the 2017 runoff to come in at more than 1 million acre-feet. The last wet winter came in 2010, when 1,430,000 AF of precipitation filled the Salt and Verde reservoirs.

After an early El Nino forecast of more than 1 million acre-feet in 2016, last year’s runoff wound up producing 338,181 acre-feet – the unprecedented sixth consecutive year of below-median runoff. Over the previous five years, the final runoff season numbers were 328,360 AF in 2015; 148,000 AF in 2014, the eighth-driest since SRP has been keeping records for the last 118 years; 444,788 AF in 2013; 196,064 in 2012; and 222,907 in 2011.

I also noticed that the Horseshoe Lake release today is at 14,000 cfs
Which explains why the Verde was full from bank to bank under the State Route 87 bridge near Fort McDowell.

If 4,000cfs looks like this, I can't imagine what 14,000cfs looks like!

Wow, I've seen some high flows out there but that seems massive!
I think it was fairly high in 2005 after the willow fire but I don't think it was this high.
Taco vs Exploder challenge?

@chumley
I saw that on the SRP site this morning, that has to be crazy! If it weren't for this dang work thang I would be out there right now.