Past IEM Features tagged: fire
Rare Critical Fire Wx Risk
19 Feb 2026 05:30 AMThe Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is most widely known for issuing severe thunderstorm and tornado watches along with convective outlooks. SPC also has a fire weather program with associated fire weather outlooks. For Wednesday, SPC had much of Iowa highlighted with a critical fire weather risk due to strong winds, low humidity, and ample dry surface vegetation. The IEM maintains an unofficial archive of these outlooks and a GIS calculation indicates that the Wednesday critical risk covered more of Iowa than any previous such risk since the beginning of the archive in 2006. The featured chart attempts to show how rare these events are by plotting the yearly duration between the first and last such event that spatially overlapped Iowa by at least 5% of Iowa's area. The right hand side panel plots the number of such events per year. If you run this autoplot with a 50% overlap requirement, you will find only four such events over the period of record including yesterday. This was also the first such event during the month of February for Iowa.
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Good: 15
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Tags: fire 2026
S California Fire Wx
14 Jan 2025 05:30 AMIn addition to convective outlooks, the Storm Prediction Center issues a fire weather outlook. The featured chart presents the daily maximum SPC fire weather outlook for the NWS Los Angeles forecast area since 2006. The chart shows the fire weather season mostly confined to the fall and early winter season, but events can happen about any time of year. The recent combination of down-slope wind and dry vegetation have materialized dangerous fire weather conditions. SPC has issued a couple of "Extreme" categorical outlook risks over the past week, which is something akin to the convective "High" risk that us Iowans have some experience with. Unfortunately, the fire weather risk looks to continue this week for the area with no precipitation forecast for the near term.
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Good: 11
Bad: 0
Tags: fire