Over the weekend, a very small wildfire broke out in a hilly and densely vegetated area of Prospect Park, a swath of green space in Brooklyn. The 2-acre blaze drew about 100 firefighters as residents were warned to stay out of the park. Meanwhile, on the New York-New Jersey border, another blaze, the Jennings Creek wildfire, has burned thousands of acres, sending smoke drifting across much of New York City and killing an 18-year-old New York state forest ranger volunteer who died while responding to the fire.
Is this typical? Not exactly. But the Northeast has been under severe drought conditions for weeks. These fires, and the dozens of others currently burning in the Northeast and across the Ohio River Valley, as well as the scores more in the Western US, are the consequence of months of unseasonably hot and dry weather across large swaths of the country.
For much of the country, October was an extremely hot and dry month. We are currently on pace for 2024 to become the hottest year ever recorded, a declaration that forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization are making with confidence even with more than a month left.
According to the US Drought Monitor, the long periods of hot and dry conditions have left every state in the country facing drought — an unprecedented statistic.
The good news is that the trend is for slightly wetter conditions (but not statistically significant). Here is a long-term graph of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Higher means wetter and the trend is +0.01 per decade.
I wonder how they measure incidences of extremes. In the summer we had three months of extreme heat and no rain leading to ‘exceptional’ drought. Then in September we had an overnight gully washer that suddenly turned our desert like ditches into raging rivers and our dead brown yards into ponds. Then Helene gave us a multi-day downpour that y’all already know about. Massive relentless downpours even though we were 300 miles from the hardest hit areas.
I have pictures of me crossing dead, dried out rivers and streams in the Shenandoah National Park in August followed by pictures of me walking knee deep in flowing water on the Appalachian Trail in late September.
