Florida - drought and wildland fire potential outlook

source: http://radar.srh.noaa.gov/fire/briefing.php (obtained on 1/8/11)

source: http://radar.srh.noaa.gov/fire/briefing.php (obtained on 1/8/11)

A while back a friend sent my a link to a Fire Weather Page (experimental) of the National Weather Service, it may be found here. So, I went there to see what information I could find about the elevated fire danger in Florida, and thought that two maps that I posted above might be of interest. In the map on the top, you can see that Florida, along with other areas in the south, is in an area where the drought is forecast to persist or intensify. In the second map, you will see that the wildland fire potential outlook for the month of January 2011, both Florida and Texas is estimated to be above normal.

The Southern Area Coordination Center (SACC) has an intelligence page with a variety of useful information, including U.S. year to date fire and acreage by state and agency that may be found here. According to the year to date figures for Jan, 7, 2011, there have been 93 wildand fires in Florida burning 1,292 acres and 6 prescribed burns at 14,272 acres. I'm not quite sure how often these figures are update, so when you go to that site, you may well find different numbers.


Another document of interest at the SACC intelligence page is the U.S. Year to Date Large Incidence List dated January 7, 2011 (again, what you see may be different), there have been three large fires in Florida year-to-date.

• New Years Fire (FL-FLS-2011-08-0848), burning 25 acres with 4 structures destroyed,
• Deep Cypress Fire (FL-FLS-2010-18-0213), burning 684 acres, and
• Black Bear Fire (FL-FLS-2011-17-0005), burning 300 acres.

All were human caused. They report start and ending dates. The three fires burned for about one day. The ending dates for the Deep Cypress and the Black Bear Fires were Jan. 6, 2011 with a start date of Jan. 5, 2011. The New Years Fire started on Jan. 1, 2011 with an ending date of Jan. 2, 2011.

My only concern in discussing these numbers is that I have no historical data to compare them with. Also, it is only one week into the New Year, so it is still early. Time will tell if Florida was a bad winter fire season or not.

Perhaps some of you will want to check out the SACC intelligence page later to see what is going in Florida.

The State of Florida has a fire information page with links to a map and a daily summary. I can not get the daily summary page to work in either of the browsers on my Mac, so I am not linking to it here. Perhaps those of you with PCs will have better luck. I can access Florida's mapping page which I can access with Firefox, but it requires you to get Microsoft's silverlight plug-in. You will want to read the instructions for their mapping system first which may be found here. They do have a link to mapping system that does not require silverlight that may be found here.