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       #Post#: 222--------------------------------------------------
       TEXAS BURNS
       By: wolfie Date: April 21, 2011, 10:52 am
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       Fires Scorch More Than 1M Acres of Texas, Burn Hundreds of Homes
       By DINA FINE MARON of ClimateWire
       Published: April 21, 2011
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       More than 1 million acres of Texas plains and forests has gone
       up in smoke this month as hundreds of fires blazed through the
       Lone Star State.
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       Gusting winds, statewide drought and low humidity have created
       tinderbox conditions that state and federal firefighters are
       still struggling to contain. Lacking a forecast of steady
       downpours to cool the scorching earth, the Texas Forest Service
       is expecting the fire conditions to continue wreaking havoc
       throughout the state.
       "Until we get significant moisture -- which would probably be
       two or three days of a half-inch of a rain a day -- we will
       continue to have fires like this," said Darrell Schulte, the
       current fire behavior specialist for the Texas Forest Service.
       "It's unlikely they will see much relief before June," he said.
       Fueling the fires are winds registering as high as 60 miles per
       hour that whip embers across acres of vegetation starved for
       rain. Typically, rain showers cool Texas' scorching earth this
       time of year, but those rains failed to materialize in 2011 --
       making this season the driest since the Texas Forest Service
       started keeping records in 1915.
       Last summer brought higher-than-average rainfalls, ironically
       exacerbating fire conditions by encouraging lush grass and
       shrubs to grow, said Schulte. That same vegetation, now parched,
       is making ideal kindling to feed wildfires as they spread across
       the state.
       Outrunning computer fire models
       "Drought is cyclical, and there is a strong relationship between
       La Niña patterns and below-normal rainfall in the Southwest,"
       said Dave Samuhel, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com. Still,
       the current drought -- which has led to some sections of Texas
       netting the most severe drought label from the National Oceanic
       and Atmospheric Administration while the rest of the state also
       ranks high on the scale -- may serve as a more extreme case, he
       said.
       "A lot of this fire behavior is outside the modeling
       capabilities. The models give us an idea, but it doesn't match
       what happens in reality in extreme conditions," said Schulte.
       Even with more accurate fire modeling technology honed in the
       last decade, firefighters are only able to do so much to contain
       these unpredictable wind-driven fires.
       Since the wildfire season began Nov. 15, Texas has lost more
       than 373 homes, 244 of them just in the last month, according to
       estimates from Texas Gov. Rick Perry's office.
       Texas is still continuing to battle some of the worst fires that
       first erupted April 6 as well as new ones that spring up each
       day, pouring thousands of gallons of fire retardant on the fires
       and deploying firefighters from Texas and more than 30 other
       states.
       Changing climate may contribute
       Over the weekend, Perry (R) wrote to the White House to request
       that the wildfire situation in Texas be declared a major
       disaster.
       Since January, the estimated cost of fighting Texas wildfires
       has tallied in at more than $20 million, according to the Texas
       Forest Service. Securing a disaster designation would shift some
       of those costs and mitigation responsibilities to the Federal
       Emergency Management Agency.
       Dan Byrd, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service,
       called this drought situation "unprecedented" -- pointing to how
       widespread the fires have become across the state and to the
       extent of the drought since October. "We haven't seen anything
       like this for the state since the early 1900s," he said.
       While the region is expecting some thunderstorms through Sunday,
       that rainfall will not be enough to cool the dry tinder and
       thick burning wood, said Byrd.
       "The fires aren't due to climate change, but the changing
       climate, I think, has been a contributing factor. I can't
       imagine that climate change hasn't had a deleterious impact,"
       said Dave Cleaves, the climate change adviser for the U.S.
       Forest Service.
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