I am seeing strange drops from the sky and enjoying every minute. Strange drops from the sky aka RAIN!
I come to you today about 40 hours after it started raining in my neck of the woods in northwestern New Jersey. I know that wildfires in northern areas of New Jersey and adjoining Pennsylvania and New York that wildfires that are still being monitored by the New Jersey Forest Fire Service and firefighting agencies in PA and NY have benefited from the rains and snow fall over the last 36 hours. As I write this, more rain and snow is expected today.
I took advantage of yesterday’s rain and took a day off from my blog, the first in a couple of weeks, after doing my best to follow and report on the 2024 New Jersey Fall Wildfire Season. I know enough to know while this rain and snowfall may make a dent in our drought warning it is not enough to remove the drought warnings in New Jersey. I also know that any amount of rain can help to put out any surface fires within containment lines of wildfires that have burned in New Jersey this fall.
The wildfire that comes to mind as I write this is the Jennings Creek Wildfire that burned around 5,000 acres in Passaic County NJ and Orange County NY. I was curious to know the amount of precipitation (rain and snow) that fell over the Jennings Creek Wildfire so I went to the NWS Weather Forecast Office, New York New York that covers northeastern NJ, New York City, Long Island and some of the lower hudson valley in New York including Orange County. I found their liquid equivalent (includes rainfall and the liquid equivalent of snow fall) in a post on their account on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) shown below.
You should be able to where you should be able to access the first link “11_22_rainfall_pns.pdf” which is the statement with liquid equivalents. You will see two figures for Warwick in Orange County New York of 1.84 inches and 2.30 inches. Looking at the data for Passaic County, I did see a report in the immediate vicinity of this wildfire, but if the reports for Ringwood and West Milford omitted northern Passaic County are any indication than it stands to reason that the fire area in New Jersey may have seen over 1.5 inches of liquid equivalent. This will certainly help to extinguish the surface fire burning within the containment lines. In addition, the rain and snow fall has wetted down leaves, twigs, needles and other detritus that might spark a wildfire.
While I am very grateful for the rain and snow that we have had I am concerned about what might happen if we again go into a period of no or limited precipitation. While I believe that wildfires might be less likely to happen in the winter, they can happen.
