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.
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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.