IMETs working Northern California Wildfires

Regular readers know that I have lots of respect for the work the National Weather Service Incident Meteorologists do when the are assigned to a specific for a two-week deployment. See for example my May 17th 2017 post where you will learn a little about what IMETs do from a NWS incident meteorologist and this November 2016 post where you will see a video of an IMET answering questions from a middle school class.

I thought that you might be interested in recent IMET deployments to wildfires in Northern California. So, I went to the NWS IMET Facebook page where I found the following IMET deployments since October 9th. Information about these and other wildfires burning in northern California and elsewhere in California, along with a map, may be accessed from the CAL FIRE Incident Page.

Before I go any further, I want to pause and say how much I appreciate all of you IMETs who are working these horrible and devastating wildfires in northern California. I know that you are working hard monitoring weather conditions on your fire. Especially but not limited to monitoring wind forecasts, I understand that some of these wildfires experienced more high winds the other night. What you do is so crucial to keep firefighters on the ground safe. Thank-you. And you stay safe as well.

Edited on October 14 at 6:30 AM to add: The IMETs working the northern California wildfires as well as nearby NWS Weather Forecast Offices of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area will be monitoring Red Flag Warning conditions that are expected occur this weekend, October 13th to 15th (see my post of October 13th for more information).

IMETS save lives!

The four deployments below were on the evening of Monday, October 9th.


The Redwood Complex is part of the Mendocino Lake Complex of Wildfires.


The Tubbs Fire is part of the Central LNU Complex of Wildfires


The Atlas Fire is part of the Southern LNU Complex of Wildfires



Last, but by no means least, an IMET Trainee (to read more about IMET trainees read my July 21st post) was deployed to the Central LNU Complex on October 11th.  Wow, I wish this trainee well as they work with an experienced IMET and fill their taskbook.



Here is a screen grab I did this morning (October 13th) from the NWS EDD interactive map showing current IMET deployments (the pinkish-purple circles) in Northern California. To the best of my knowledge, all the deployments that I have referenced above are mapped out below. Note that IMET locations are found in fire weather under more layers.