"Historic heat wave in Oklahoma"

From Jeff Master's Wunderground Blog:
A historic heat wave and drought fueled raging fires on Friday in Oklahoma. The fires destroyed at least 65 homes, forced multiple evacuations, and closed major roads. Oklahoma City had its hottest day in history, hitting 113°, tying the city's all-time heat record set on August 11, 1936. The low bottomed out at 84°, the warmest low temperature ever recorded in the city (previous record: a low of 83° on August 13, 1936.) Oklahoma City has now had three consecutive days with a high of 112° or higher, which has never occurred since record keeping began in 1891. With today's high expected to reach 113° again, the streak may extend to four straight days. Yesterday was the third consecutive day with more than a third of Oklahoma experiencing temperatures of 110° or higher, according to readings from the Oklahoma Mesonet. NOAA's Storm Prediction Center (SPC) declared a "Critical" fire weather day over most of Oklahoma yesterday, due to extreme heat and drought, low humidities, and strong winds. Between 4 - 5 pm CDT Friday, Oklahoma City had a temperature of 113°, a humidity of 12%, and winds of 14 mph gusting to 25 mph. Another "Critical" fire weather day has been declared for Saturday. A cold front approaching from the northwest will bring winds even stronger than Friday's winds, and Oklahoma will likely endure another hellish day of extreme heat, dryness, and fires.



The Geary, Oklahoma fire, looking north, on August, 3, 2012. Image credit: Oklahoma City Fire Department. The Geary fire spawned a gustnado. 

Only comparable heat wave: August 1936
The only heat wave in Oklahoma history that compares to this week's occurred in the great Dust Bowl summer of 1936, the hottest summer in U.S. history. Oklahoma City experienced three days at 110° that summer, and a record streak of 22 straight days with a temperature of 100° or hotter. Those numbers are comparable to 2012's: three days at 110° or hotter, and a string of 17 consecutive days with temperatures of 100° or hotter. It's worth noting that Oklahoma City has experienced only 11 days since 1890 with a high of 110° or greater. Three of those days were in 2011, three were in 2012, and three were in the great Dust Bowl summer of 1936. Clouds moved in over Tulsa, Oklahoma yesterday, holding down the high temperature to just 107°, ending that city's 3-day streak of 110°+ days. The only longer streak was 5 consecutive days on August 9 - 13, 1936. 

Australia - What Global Warming Looks Like

From the LA Times:

Reporting from The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia -- Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done .

"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."

A result of climate change?

"You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise," Eddy said.

They call Australia the Lucky Country, with good reason. Generations of hardy castoffs tamed the world's driest inhabited continent, created a robust economy and cultivated an image of irresistibly resilient people who can't be held down. Australia exports itself as a place of captivating landscapes, brilliant sunshine, glittering beaches and an enviable lifestyle.

Look again. Climate scientists say Australia -- beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves -- epitomizes the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

"Australia is the harbinger of change," said paleontologist Tim Flannery, Australia's most vocal climate change prophet. "The problems for us are going to be greater. The cost to Australia from climate change is going to be greater than for any developed country. We are already starting to see it. It's tearing apart the life-support system that gives us this world."

Many here believe Australia already has a death toll directly connected to climate change: the 173 people who died in February during the nation's worst-ever wildfires, and 200 more who died from heat the week before. A three-person royal commission has convened to decide, among other things, whether global warming contributed to massive bush fires that destroyed entire towns and killed a quarter of Victoria state's koalas, kangaroos, birds and other wildlife.

The commission's proceedings mark the first time anywhere that climate change could be put on trial. And it will take place in a nation that still gets 80% of its energy from burning coal, the globe's largest single source of greenhouse gases.

The commission's findings aren't due until August, but veteran firefighters, scientists and residents believe the case has already been made. Even before the flames, 200 Melbourne residents died in a heat wave that buckled the steel skeleton on a newly constructed 400-foot Ferris wheel and warped train tracks like spaghetti. Cities experienced four days of temperatures at 110 degrees or higher with little humidity, and 100-mph winds. In areas where fires hit, temperatures reached 120.

On the hottest day, more than 4,000 gray-headed flying foxes dropped dead out of trees in one Melbourne park.

"Something is happening in Australia," firefighter Dan Condon of the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade wrote in an open letter. "Global warming is no longer some future event that we don't have to worry about for decades. What we have seen in the past two weeks moves Australia's exposure to global warming to emergency status."

The possibility that a high-profile royal commission may find a nexus between climate change and the loss of human life is significant for many scientists here.

"That will be an important moment in its own right," said Chris Cocklin, a climate change researcher at James Cook University in Townsville, in Queensland state, and lead author on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"It may mean that climate change will be brought to the fore in a way that has never happened before."...

"Creating Our Own Hell on Earth"

Climate Warming Causes Drought Fueled Mega-Fires
by Tom Turnipseed

Five years ago my wife and I discontinued using our lawn irrigation sprinkler system. Now we only water our small vegetable garden. Facing evidence of climate change, we are trying to do our part to save water.

With water supplies rapidly shrinking, Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared a state of emergency for 85 counties and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area on October 20, 2007. A drought of historic proportions is affecting Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia. Meanwhile, drought is feeding a fiery fiasco in California.

In the past five days, parts of southern California have become out-of-control, raging infernos as another hot dry summer turns dehydrated forests into combustible tinder‑boxes. On October 21, 2007, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reported that “recently there has been an enormous change in Western fires. In truth, we’ve never seen anything like them in recorded history. It appears we’re living in a new age of mega-fires — forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we’re used to seeing.” According to the number of acres burned, 7 of the 10 busiest forest fire seasons in the United States have occurred since 1999 based on records going back 47 fire seasons to 1960.

Pelley said last year’s was the worst in recorded history, and this year is already a close second, with two months to go. More than eight million acres have already burned this year. After 30 years of fighting fires, Tom Boatner is now the chief of fire operations for the federal government. He says, “A fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have been extremely rare 15, 20 years ago, but they’re commonplace these days, Ten years ago, if you had a 100,000 acre fire, you were talking about a huge fire. And if we had one or two of those a year, that was probably unusual. Now we talk about 200,000 acre fires like it’s just another day at the office. It’s been a huge change.”

Pelley also talked with Tom Swetnam, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. Swetnam has the largest collection of tree rings in the world, that go back 9,000 years, with each one of those rings capturing one year of climate history.

Swetnam says recent decades have been the hottest in 1,000 years, with a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires were rare in the past. “As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there’s a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S.,” Swetnam says.

Swetnam contends that climate change — global warming — has increased temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four times more fires. Swetnam and his colleagues published those findings in the journal “Science,” and the world’s leading researchers on climate change have endorsed their conclusions.

Pelley mentioned to Boatner that there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change. Boatner replied, “You won’t find them on the fire line in the American West anymore. Cause we’ve had climate change beat into us over the last ten or fifteen years. We know what we’re seeing, and we’re dealing with a period of climate, in terms of temperature and humidity and drought that’s different than anything people have seen in our lifetimes.”...

Southern California Fires

"Around 1,000 homes, 300,000 acres burned in San Diego County, Supervisor Ron Robert says"

News from San Diego...

Seasonal wind gusts drive flames across S. California

The devastating firestorms whipping through San Diego County are being fueled by Santa Ana winds with a ferocity rarely seen in this region.

It was worse elsewhere in Southern California. A gust of 112 mph was recorded two days ago at Laguna Peak, north of Los Angeles. Locally, gusts in Potrero, near the deadly Harris fire, peaked at 69 mph.

“For San Diego County to see gusts up to 60 mph, that's a major event,” said National Weather Service forecaster Brandt Maxwell.

There may be more to come. Although winds are expected to start easing this afternoon, it is early in the Santa Ana season.

Santa Anas are fairly common in October, but the prime months are December and January. No one is saying the winter winds will be as strong as this week's blasts, but they should be more frequent, said Stuart Seto, a forecaster in the weather service's Oxnard office....

Exacerbating the situation are the fires themselves. Fires can create their own winds, Seto said. The bigger a fire gets, the more oxygen it needs to feed itself, which can increase wind speeds even more.

Orange and San Diego counties call for more evacuations overnight

Wind-whipped firestorms destroyed more than 700 homes and businesses in Southern California on Monday, the second day of its onslaught, and more than half a million people in San Diego County were told to evacuate their homes.

The gale-force winds turned hillside canyons into giant blowtorches from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Although the worst damage was around San Diego and Lake Arrowhead, dangerous fires also threatened Malibu, parts of Orange and Ventura counties, and the Agua Dulce area near Santa Clarita. New evacuations came overnight in Orange and San Diego counties, as the menacing winds refused to abate.

Late Monday night, new blazes threatened homes near Stevenson Ranch and in Soledad Canyon in northern Los Angeles County. The Soledad Canyon fire burned multiple mobile homes and evacuations were underway, fire officials said.

On Monday, near Malibu, where fire Sunday had burned into the center of town, the focus was in the hills, where firefighters on the ground and in the air were trying to prevent flames from marching across Las Flores Canyon and into Topanga Canyon.

"It's trying to move toward Topanga Canyon, parallel to the coastline," said Manhattan Beach Battalion Chief Frank Chiella, near the Rambla Pacifico area. Firefighters were attempting to stay ahead of the fire and funnel it toward the ocean.

"If you let it get wide, that's a lot more homes it could take out," Chiella said. "We're doing what we can to keep it from getting bigger; we've only lost one home today."

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"South America chokes as Amazon burns"

Vast areas of Brazil and Paraguay and much of Bolivia are choking under thick layers of smoke as fires rage out of control in the Amazon rainforest, forcing the cancellation of flights.

Satellite images yesterday showed huge clouds of smoke and much of the Amazon basin burning as fires, originally set by ranchers to clear land, have raged into the forest itself.

From Santa Cruz in the east of Bolivia, where flights have been grounded, to the Brazilian frontier city of Porto Velho, where the river Madeira has been made unnavigable, burning smoke has blocked out the sun and local communities have begun to complain of respiratory disorders.

Roberto Smeraldi, head of Friends of the Earth Brazil, said the situation was out of control: "We have a strong concentration of fires, corresponding to more than 10,000 points of fire across a large area of about two million sq km in the southern Brazilian Amazon and Bolivia."

Each year at the end of the dry season, in anticipation of the first winter rains, farmers and cattle ranchers throughout South America set fires to "renovate" pasture land. But this age-old cycle has spun out of control as deforestation and climate change have created a tinderbox. There has also been a massive expansion of cattle ranching into forested areas, where fires are then set to clear an area after chainsaws have felled the trees.

Mr Smeraldi was clear on who was to blame for this year's fires: "They are mainly, I would say more than 90 per cent, the result of expanding cattle ranching." The first rains have arrived but they are weaker than usual in most areas and have been useless against the fires.

In the past three years Brazil's National Development Bank and the World Bank have poured funds into the southern Amazon, fuelling the expansion of the cattle industry with new slaughterhouses and four million additional head of cattle arriving in exactly the areas where the fires are now. Conservationists have said that while governments insist they are doing their utmost to stop deforestation they have been putting in place incentives for the destruction of the forest. "It is taxpayers' money fuelling these fires," said Mr Smeraldi.

Standing forests, of which the Amazon is the largest in the world, play a vital role in regulating the world's climate, both absorbing harmful emissions and acting as vast carbon sinks. At present these forests are not included in the international carbon trading schemes set up under the Kyoto agreement – the only serious global effort to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. In recent weeks there has been an increase in efforts to raise the issue of avoided deforestation as a means of limiting the impact of catastrophic climate change.

"These fires are the suicide note of mankind," said Hylton Murray Philipson, from the London-based charity Rainforest Concern. "While politicians talk about defining moments, destruction will continue until we begin to attribute real value to the standing forest.

"The forces of globalisation will intensify with the construction of two asphalt roads linking the western Brazilian Amazon to the Pacific coast of Peru, dramatically shortening the export route to China," said Mr Murray-Philipson. "If we do not enable local people to gain a livelihood from the standing forest, it will continue to be converted into cattle pasture and soya prairies – and we will only have ourselves to blame."

Brazil and Indonesia do not appear on conventional industrial indices of the world's leading polluters but both countries are among the world's top four carbon emitters when deforestation is factored in.

"Fires sweep Greece turning villages to ash and killing 46 (+)"

With 46 dead yesterday afternoon and the toll expected to climb, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis declared a state of emergency, saying the forest fires 'can't be a coincidence'. He vowed that the arsonists would be found. Within hours police had arrested a suspect.

'All regions of the country are declared in a state of emergency in order to mobilise all means and forces to face this disaster,' he said in a televised address to the nation. 'We are living a national tragedy,' said Karamanlis.

He called an extraordinary cabinet meeting after visiting villages that had been reduced to cinders in the southern Peloponnese. With at least two tourists among the dead - and hundreds more holiday-makers threatened - Karamanlis urged Greece's EU partners to despatch more water-dropping planes and helicopters, saying it was a crisis Greece could not handle alone.

It was, he said, a day of 'national mourning' that would not be forgotten soon. All state buildings, including parliament, were ordered to fly flags at half-mast.

'These are very difficult times for all of us,' said Karamanlis, whose government has faced criticism for its handling of an unrivalled spate of forest fires that has wrought destruction across Greece this summer.

'I wish to express my deep grief over the lost lives. We are fighting against heavy odds, on many fronts and under particularly tough conditions.'

With new fires erupting almost hourly and authorities battling some 170 blazes from the Ionian Sea in the west, Ioannina in the north and the Peloponnese in the south, firefighting services have been stretched to the limit - despite the military being mobilised by the government. Gale-force winds known as the meltemi, which sweep across Greece in August, were also hampering efforts to extinguish the flames.

By late afternoon yesterday, as fires erupted on the fringes of Athens, threatening buildings, forcing the evacuation of monks from a monastery and closing the national highway, a wall of flames stretched across the Peloponnese with witnesses describing harrowing scenes.

Officials said the devastation was on a scale not seen in peacetime. Entire villages looked as though they had been vaporised, people and livestock incinerated. People who had tried to escape fires engulfing homesteads were found dead in their burnt-out cars. In one village near the Peloponnesian town of Zaharo, police discovered the bodies of a mother and her four children.

'There's absolute pandemonium here. It's like a war zone. In a single night everything we know has been destroyed,' Nikos Kakovessis, a resident of the town, said. 'People have lost their homes, their cattle, everything they own. May God cast his hand to stop this evil. May the worst be over.'

Frightened locals, authorities said, had been joined on the beaches of the peninsula by tourists forced to flee hotels and resorts at the peak of the holiday season. Many had fled the flames with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. With thousands expected to spend last night outside, nearby tavernas were providing tablecloths for evacuees to sleep on.

Greece has seen more than 300 fires in the past three months. The ecological disaster has dented the popularity of the ruling Conservatives, who have called early elections to take place on 16 September.
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(Extra info)Arson is often suspected, mostly to clear land for development. No construction is allowed in Greece in areas designated as forest land, and fires could be set to circumvent the law by disputing the status of the area.

Meanwhile:

States, feds try to keep up with wildfires

With major fires burning in more than a dozen states and officials on high alert for more, authorities are scrambling to contain the blazes and keep new ones from igniting, despite unfavorable weather and strained resources.

The worst fires have hit the West, where stifling heat, drought conditions and frequent thunderstorms bringing wind and lightning have proven a disastrous natural combination. More than 1 million acres already have been torched in Idaho and Montana, where crews from around the country battled 36 large blazes as of Aug. 17, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). Oregon, Washington and Wyoming also faced at least three major fires each, and conflagrations continued in states as far afield as Alaska and Hawaii.

The NIFC, which coordinates firefighting efforts nationwide from its base in Boise, Idaho, last month raised the nation’s wildfire preparedness level to its highest degree, freeing up additional help from cooperating agencies at home and abroad. Canada, for example, is expected to send units to assist in Idaho and Montana. At least 6.1 million acres across the United States have burned so far this year, according to statistics compiled by the NIFC and updated daily.

“Every year the fire season is longer and worse than the year before, and we’re seeing that again this year,” says Steven Kline, director of federal forestry programs with the National Association of State Foresters in Washington, D.C.

Governors in at least 11 states, most of them in the West, have made emergency declarations this summer due to wildfires, and some states – most recently Michigan and Montana – announced burning bans in an effort to prevent uncontrolled blazes. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. asked localities across the state to ban the personal use of fireworks, but many local leaders ignored the request amid questions over whether they had authority to impose a ban.

Worst July on record for Europe forest fires: EU

With the European forest fire season barely underway, EU figures show that last month was the worst July on record and one of the worst months ever recorded for outbreaks.
The news came as Spain confirmed that a a 44-year-old female firefighter had become the first victim of the forest fires sweeping Spain.

Spain's Canary Islands are meanwhile continuing to battle two major fires which have ravaged some 350 square kilometres (135 square miles) of land in recent days and forced the evacuation of thousands of people.

The situation in southwest Europe, which had relatively moderate conditions in July, "has changed dramatically, particularly in the south of the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands" in recent days, the European Commission said in a statement.

Experts have warned that the fires on Spain's Canary islands are an environmental catastrophe with some 20 percent of forests on the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria burned. Reforestation is expected to take years.

The Gran Canaria fire is the largest in the history of the archipelago.

Provisional figures from the European Forest Fire Information System show that 3,376 square kilometres of land has already been burned in Europe this year, compared to a total of 3,585 square kilometres in 2006, with July 2007 one of the worst-ever months on record, said European Commission spokeswoman Antonia Mochan.

Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Italy were also badly hit by the forest fires, accounting for over 2,200 square kilometres of the devastation.

The most recent Spanish fires were not included in the EU figures released Thursday.

"In order to seek help with fighting its forest fires, Spain has invoked the International Charter on major disasters" that aims to proved a unified system of satellite imagery to help those affected by natural or man-made disasters, Mochan told reporters.

EFFIS, which monitors forest fires in 19 EU and non-EU countries, forecasts continued risk from forest fires for the days ahead. Its record goes back over 20 years for some EU nations with other countries including Finland providing information for only the past few years.

"In West, it's either flames or floods"

...On the Utah-Arizona line, where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, 50 firefighters and two air tankers fought a blaze southwest of St. George that was sparked by lightning Thursday and burned at least 4, 000 acres, or six square miles.

In Southern California, a 1, 500-acre wildfire burned Friday in the foothills of Santa Barbara County. It was 30 percent contained and had "potential to grow, " county fire Capt. Eli Iskow said.

In southeast Oregon, a burning vehicle ignited a wildfire Thursday that grew to 10, 000 acres. It was burning Friday five miles away from the Oregon State University's Northern Great Basin Experiment Station, federal officials said.

- Rain slows in and around Texas, but water may still rise -

Heavy rains that have pounded parts of Texas for weeks were leaving the state Friday, but the fast-moving currents they left in the Brazos River hampered the search for a boy swept from his father's arms.

Meanwhile, rivers in Oklahoma and Kansas continued to recede, revealing millions of dollars in flood damage to homes and businesses.

The region may get some relief beginning this weekend. Much of Texas may get some daytime showers and isolated thunderstorms over the weekend, but the large swaths of pounding rain were expected to dissipate, forecasters said...

But river waters could keep rising in some places. Forecasters warned that the Trinity River in East Texas would crest near 43 feet on Sunday - well above the 28-foot flood stage. Flood warnings were in effect for rivers in Oklahoma.

The waters of the Brazos River in East Texas were moving so fast that it was pushing out 20 miles into the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, and taking everything caught upstream - from cars to refrigerators to trees - with it...