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Record hot July comes amid bad fire season

Jim Trotter
Rocky Mountain PBS I-News
This still from an Associated Press video shows a wildfire burning this summer in Washington state.
Associated Press |

Hot temperatures this summer have played havoc along the Pacific Coast, in the northern Rockies and though wide swaths of Alaska. The heat has gone hand-in-hand with ongoing drought to produce a hellish fire season.

The blazes have “burned a big hole in our state’s heart,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said this month after three firefighters were killed while fighting a wildfire near the town of Twisp in the north-central region of the state. “These are three big heroes protecting small towns,” he said.

All were seasonal firefighters working for the U.S. Forest Service when they perished in a firestorm on a sun-baked hillside near Twisp, Okanogan County. Their names: Tom Zbyszewski, Andrew Zajac and Richard Wheeler, the Seattle Times reported.



It was the deadliest wildfire incident in Washington since four firefighters were killed in the Thirtymile fire in 2001. Firefighters also have died in California this particularly brutal season.

As a sign of that severity, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, announced that it had mobilized firefighters from Australia and New Zealand to assist with wildfires in the U.S. West, the first time that has happened since 2008.



The agency said its National Preparedness Level remains at 5, the highest level. That speaks to the extent of ongoing wildfire activity and the commitment already made of available resources. Weather and fuel conditions are predicted to continue to be conducive to new wildfire starts for the next few weeks.

While Colorado’s wet spring and summer have held down wildfires in the state, smoke from the Northwest now is expected to linger until the fires are out, perhaps until October.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was among the agencies to report that July was the warmest month on Earth since record keeping began in 1880.

The July average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46 degrees above the 20th century average. And since July is the warmest month for the year in global climate terms, that gave July 2015 the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880-2015 record. The 61.86 degrees record sounds reasonably pleasant, but includes North and South poles and all nights.

The year-to-date temperature combined across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.53 degrees above the 20th century average, also the highest for January-July in the 1880-2015 record. In other words, 2015 is on pace to break the record for warmest year on record, surpassing that set in 2010, with a tie for third place between 2013 and 2005, according to NOAA’s new dataset.


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