How Much Does Climate Change Have To Do With Western Firestorms?

Last I checked earlier this morning, part of the city of Medford, Oregon, population 82,000 is on fire.

The entire city has been evacuated, or told to get ready to leave, and flames raced into town from nearby Ashland. 

Big railroad tressle burning
in Washington State. Photo
by Brian Stott

This is the latest big crisis out west as fires rage through forests, campgrounds and homes from Washington State all the way down to the Mexican border in southern California.

The weirdness continues elsewhere in the West, with unprecedented early season snows falling, as predicted, in places like Colorado, Wyoming and the Black Hills of South Dakota. 

One place that really had some weather whiplash was Rapid City, South Dakota, where it was 102 degrees on Saturday, followed just two days later by an inch of snow,   Now, there's a change in the weather!

Salt Lake City, Utah, experienced a huge downslope windstorm Tuesday, with gusts of 112 mph at the University of Utah and 70 mph at the city's airport. There's widespread damage there, as you might expect.  

I always say that it's impossible to tell to what extent climate change has to do with a particular weather event, but the western wildfires are completely in line with what the climate scientists have been warning us about. 

As always, though, if climate change did influence what is happening it's just seriously worsening some problems that likely would have been there anyway. Although chances are, without climate change, Medford, Oregon would not be on fire, though I'd guess there would still be fires burning in Oregon and other western states.

Believe it or not, typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean can prompt weather extremes in the western United States and this was the root cause of much of the havoc the West has seen in the past few days. 

When typhoons head north off or over the coasts of Japan and South Korea, they disrupt the jet stream so that a big ridge or northward bulge in the jet stream  sometimes forms along the West Coast of the United States.

This actually happens fairly often in September and October. It's part of the reason California is prone to wildfires in the autumn, and part of the reason you can get early season snows in the eastern Rockies.

However, this time, the ridge along the West Coast was much stronger than normal, and in fact might have been the strongest upper level ridge for this time of year. (Ridges tend to get weaker as we head further into autumn and winter).

Tuesday afternoon in Salem, Oregon
 beneath a pall of wildfire smoke

The strength of that ridge prompted those record high temperatures over the past several days on the West Coast.  It also caused a steeper plunge from the north on the High Plains and Front Range of the Rockies. 

Add to this that climate change can boost already high temperatures, a drought possibly made worse by climate change, erratic fire behavior, more and more people building houses in and near wilderness areas and other factors, and you get the mess the West has experienced this past week.

In this new climate world, we are unfortunately sure to have these wildfires slamming into towns and cities over and over again.  Santa Rosa, Paradise, and Medford are not the last towns that will be devastated like this.

Video: A small town near Medford, Oregon being destroyed by the wildfire last night: