Wildfire threat ramps up in the Upper Midwest

AccuWeather

With ongoing drought levels and extremely dry air, forecasters say there's a volatile setup for wildfire conditions in much of the central U.S. this fall.

Transcript

00:00We are dealing with a pretty volatile setup for wildfire danger and joining us with more here is

00:06AccuWeather north central regional expert Matt Benz. Matt I know you spent a lot of your career

00:11in the TV world as a chief meteorologist in the upper midwest so thanks for joining us here once

00:17again. Yeah happy to be here. Yeah this is good stuff Matt and we are concerned about kind of the

00:22nowcast especially right now but even in the next few days we have some big concerns about the north

00:27central so what's contributing to this wildfire threat? Well several factors Jeff you have

00:34extremely dry conditions places like the twin cities have experienced one of the driest stretches

00:39of weather here since early September and that's just not the twin cities but you're talking about

00:42the Dakotas through Nebraska parts of Iowa and Wisconsin as well and so you have that factor

00:48dry fuels around then you need low humidity that's what they have right now and they have

00:52the wind on top of that with the general weather pattern and unfortunately those three combinations

00:57together create a volatile situation when it comes to fire concerns and you can see the red flag

01:02warnings across the region of course the drought growing across this region because of the lack

01:07of precipitation so a number of factors unfortunately Jeff coming together to produce this

01:11high fire danger risk for the region. And Matt I know that our viewers don't always think in terms

01:16of dew point people like relative humidity a scale of one to one hundred percent but you know in the

01:21weather world we really prefer dew points because that's an absolute scale if the dew point is only

01:2625 degrees in Des Moines that's very dry air for the midwest. Yeah very dry air at least for this

01:31time of the year and relative humidity I know people are more familiar with that but that is

01:35important in fire situations as that just tells you the the amount of moisture that's in the

01:40atmosphere at that point generally when you look at 25 percent humidity or lower that's not a good

01:45situation but of course you have the strong wind gusts on top of this that we are experiencing

01:49today across eastern Dakotas through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa helping to at least fan the

01:56fears of more widespread fire danger across this region. All right Matt one last question we've

02:02been talking about some of this vegetation that had some of these areas did have some pretty good

02:06rains over the spring that allowed some of this vegetation to grow in some cases more than normal

02:12but now that is starting to dry out how does that play into excessive fire danger? Yeah you'd create

02:18a broader fuel load here across the region so when you have those spring rains you're growing

02:22the vegetation out whether that's grass or other woody substances and when you get to this time

02:28of the year where it hasn't rained for a while all that fuel is just there for burning unfortunately

02:33so it's certainly a concern in a year of extremes like you said all that heavy rain early in the

02:38year now the dryness kind of playing into this fire danger for the region unfortunately

02:43this isn't going to end until we get rain or snow and unfortunately just not a lot coming to this

02:48region over the next couple of days. Yeah very true Matt a pretty unimpressive chance for showers

02:53near I-29 tomorrow and at points west but we'll be closely watching this and I know long term

03:00the northeast we're going to get into a really dry spell that continues for a lot of us here

03:03through the second half of the month as well. That's correct. All right Matt we appreciate all

03:09of your insight as always AccuWeather regional expert Matt Benz he's one of the other great

03:13meteorologists who are behind the forecast when you bring up the AccuWeather app on your phone

03:17not just a computer generated product here we got actual people who are doing great work to

03:22give you the best forecast with the human touch. Thanks again Matt.

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