Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.The prolonged lack of Midlands rain and snow is accelerating worries of grass fires and freeze damage to winter wheat.
A drought that has nagged at eastern Nebraska, northwest Iowa, the Dakotas and Minnesota now threatens most of northern Nebraska, according to the updated U.S. Drought Monitor.
Precipitation has been running less than 50 percent of normal in northern Nebraska the past two to three months, wrote Eric Luebehusen, the U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist who wrote the latest drought analysis. The Drought Monitor is produced at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
While drought is worse to the east, it is northern and western Nebraska that is at greatest risk of fire. This weekend, fire warnings were issued for wide swaths of Nebraska because of the high winds and low humidity. Those warnings expired Saturday night.
Northern and western Nebraska are drier to start with, and humidity levels can drop suddenly when temperatures climb and winds kick up.
This weekend and week are evidence of that. Despite last week's rain, gains were quickly erased by a return to windy warmth.
The ability for things to change quickly is at the heart of the problem, said Troy Davis, fire management officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"The risk can instantly go up. When you have all that fuel out there, on a really windy day, it's off to the races," Davis said. "We'll have to take it day by day and week by week."
Davis said little more can be done than to ask people to be careful and to have fire crews ready. Most winter fires start as a result of human activity — a power line, an idling vehicle in a pasture or a welding spark.
Lacking sufficient rain or snow, Al Dutcher, Nebraska state climatologist, said the fire danger could persist well into spring.
Shawn Jacobs, a meteorologist in the North Platte office of the National Weather Service, said history shows that especially damaging wildfires can occur in winter.
"A lot of people let their guard down by thinking, 'Hey, it's January, a time for snow, we're not going to have fires.' "
A mid-January 2006 fire consumed about 5,600 acres at the Nebraska National Forest near Halsey, Jacobs said.
Dutcher and Jacobs said the outlook for an increase in precipitation isn't promising, but Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at UNL's National Drought Mitigation Center, said the region could see a return to normal snow and rain in the months ahead, if a waning La Niņa holds to form.
Long-term weather patterns are hard to gauge, the three say, and it just depends how storms track as La Niņa changes. La Niņa arises from cooler-than-normal water in the Pacific Ocean and affects weather patterns across North America.
Dutcher and Fuchs see a growing threat to winter wheat. If temperatures remain higher than normal, the crop could break dormancy as early as February, Dutcher said. If that happens, the wheat is at risk of dieback from a surge of freezing Arctic air.
While rainfall would be nice, what the region really needs, weather and fire experts say, is an enduring blanket of snow. That would insulate the wheat and moisten dry grasslands.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1102, nancy.gaarder@owh.com
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