2019 wildfire season: first IMET deployment

The first National Weather Service Incident Meteorologist (IMET) was deployed on June 9th. An IMET from the NWS Tucson Arizona Weather Forecast Office was deployed to the Elk Fire that is currently burning in the Gila National Forest. According to a comment from the IMET office on this NWS IMET Facebook post on June 9th, this is their second latest start in 35 years. IMETs save lives by providing incident specific weather forecasts so that the wildland firefighters have up to date weather information specific to the incident. Personally, I am not reading anything into the late deployment of the first IMET. I have a creepy feeling that this is going to be a very busy fire season.

At the time that I am writing this post, the Elk Fire started on June 6th and has burned about 500 acres. From the incident overview that I accessed on the Elk Fire Inciweb page just now:

The Elk Fire, approximately 500 acres, is burning on National Forest System lands on the Quemado Ranger District, Gila National Forest. The strategy for this incident is to suppress the fire to the smallest fire footprint. Lack of access and resistance to control, the ability of firefighters to suppress this fire will be extremely difficult and limited. (accessed from Elk Fire Inciweb page on June 10, 2019)

I wrote a post in August 2018 about what IMETs do, including a video and links to other articles I wrote about IMETs.

IMETS save lives!