Red Flag Warnings with Chris Smallcomb, National Weather Service

Welcome to 101.5 Community Conversations on Wildfire, where we help you stay safe, informed and ready. I'm your host, JD Haas. Today we're talking about one of the most serious warnings you can hear during wildfire season. It's the red flag warning.

And with wildfire season growing longer and more intense, these warnings have become more common. But do you know what to actually do when one is issued? When?

Well, joining me today is Chris Smallcomb, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, who's here to walk us through what these warnings really mean. Welcome to 101.5. Chris.

Oh, hey, thank you so much, J.D.

Well, let's just jump right into it. The key question, the one that everybody hears the word what exactly is a red flag warning?

Exactly. So you know, the history of the red flag warning. It's been around for decades.

And traditionally, the weather service, up until let's say, 10 years ago was we kind of kept the red flag warning sort of hidden. It was just sort of between us and the firefighting agencies.

There's sort of this concern that if we advertise when we had these red flag days that the people that wanted to start fires, the arsonist would take advantage of that and they'd go out and start fires intentionally with a maximum amount of damage. But obviously, with the advent of the Internet and communication, it's out there already.

So we decided, hey, let's leverage this as a preparedness tool. So what is a red fire? There's two things that we look for meteorologically to issue a red flag warning.

One is strong winds and low humidity that once you get a fire starting, it's going to spread rapidly before they can get it under control.

The second one, it's a little less known, is actually dry lightning outbreaks, and we've had a few of those in Northern California over the years where there's just so many thunderstorms producing a lot of lightning and relatively little rainfall that it just overwhelms the first response agency. So those are the two things we look for.

Okay. Now, who decides when a red flag warning is issued?

That does come from the National Weather Service. That is one of our core alerts that we issue across the entire United States.

You know, and I kind of say that here in the Sierra and into northern Nevada, fire weather is our severe weather. We don't get tornadoes. We don't get hurricanes, but we get large fires. And so fire weather is our severe weather.

So the weather service is the agency that decides to issue these. Now, we do it not in a vacuum.

We're talking with the fire response agencies, we are talking with the forest service, we're talking with BLM to say, hey, how is the vegetation doing? Is it dry enough where it can actually carry fire?

Might be common sense, but we wouldn't necessarily issue a red flag warning in the middle of winter when there's three feet of snow on the ground and we just had an atmospheric river because nothing's really going to burn at that point. So we usually communicate, how is the vegetation doing as well.

So how far in advanced are these red flag warnings typically issued?

So on these, you know, in the scale of meteorology, there's some things that are really predictable, like heat waves. We can see Those come in 5, 10 days in advance oftentimes and other things that are not really predictable.

So let's say you're a tornado or a severe thunderstorm. That's a matter of minutes. Well, red flag warnings and fire weather actually is on the longer end of the spectrum.

So we can often see those breezy, wind windy days coming with about three to five days lead time. And then usually once we get into site, one to three days, that's when the confidence gets high enough where we actually issue a red flag warning.

And then obviously it's distributed. We see it on many, many platforms, everybody picks it up, but folks are kind of getting a little complacent with them too. And brings us to the next.

Can you give us a sense of what can go wrong if people ignore these warnings?

So I think there's the most recent years, we've generally seen a little bit of a downturn in the number of red flag days, but we've seen some pretty busy years as well. So here in the Truckee Tahoe area, we've ranged anywhere from 17 red flag days each summer in the last, say, 20 years to as little as zero.

In fact, more recently, we've had zero days of red flag conditions. So that kind of, you know, especially people new to the area, you know, they might not know what a red flag day is or what to do in that respect.

So, you know, typically just being aware that these conditions can occur where we get strong winds or lots of lightning, that can create a lot of new fires, especially if you're new to the area.

Let's talk about the science behind this. Can you help folks understand how fires behave during these conditions?

Yeah, and that's where as meteorologists, we provide the weather component.

And then actually if the fire is large enough, we, we deploy what are called incident Meteorologists actually out onto the fire lines to actually help forecast the weather. And they do this in conjunction with folks in the Forest service and BLM who are called fire behavior analysts.

So they take the meteorological information that we provide, and then they help predict what is the fire going to do. And so that's kind of a cool synchronization of expertise there on the larger fires that we've had.

So typically, when you see a strong wind day, that's just gonna accelerate the movement of the fire.

So your typical Zephyr day, where the winds are gusting 20 miles an hour or so, you know the fire's gonna move, but it may not be quick enough where they could actually get it under control somewhat early. But if we have a red flag day and the winds are gusting to 40, let's double that wind speed.

You know, we're looking at that fire getting out of control rapidly before anybody can really get a handle on it. So that's kind of the key difference on those windy days.

Can you just decipher a little bit? Just give us the difference between just windy to a real threat.

Exactly.

And, you know, and I think the presumption is that most of the damaging fires occur only on those windy red flag days or when we have lots of lightning, which, you know, there's some element of truth to that. But we've also had a number of examples of very damaging fires that have occurred on non red flag days.

And I was kinda like, okay, where did I move to? Everything's on fire all of a sudden. It was like one of the hottest summers too, on record. So that occurred on a sub red flag day.

A lot of that occurred on days where it was just normal breeziness, 20, 25 mile an hour type of winds. And you saw the destruction that occurred from that one as well.

So plenty of examples that it doesn't necessarily take a red flag day to create a damaging fire situation.

Yeah. And that fire, the Davis fire, just rolled right down old 395, right through town. And it was challenging.

And you and I were talking earlier, that fire the following day was before it was stopped. It was actually forecasted for a red flag warning. Is that correct?

That was, yeah. And so this is an example of what we have coined, the particularly dangerous situation, red flag warning.

So there's your average red flag day, which is still serious enough. Let's say winds are gusting 30, 35 miles an hour, which is still problematic for firefighting.

But every once in a while we have days, even in the middle of summer, but more often in the autumn where we get wind gusts of 40, 40, 45, 50, maybe even 60 miles an hour. Can you imagine what that's doing to a fire? I mean, that fire is going to be racing really quickly.

And fortunately, the day before, they were able to put so much water on that fire, able to get a little bit of slowdown on the fire, that that windy day didn't end up being as bad as it could have been.

And a lot of that is because of the information that the National Weather Service provided, we had provided that heads up that, hey, this day is going to be really nasty. Wind wise. Pds, red flag warning, alarm bells, purple scale, everything you got there, it's going to be bad.

And so they took the fire response agencies, took that information and they put in as much resources as they could the days before so they could try and kind of quell the fire a little bit before we had that windy day. So that's the power of good meteorology in helping the fire response.

Help is being able to be proactive on these fires and make as much progress as you can before a known windy day coming up.

Now, I want to jump into your brain a little bit here. You and I were on the first, your first fire when you came from Louisville. It was the Angora fire. That was my first fire that I reported on.

I mean, it goes without saying so much is changing in meteorology and weather prediction. AI is here, we're leveraging that technology to help predict the weather.

But just our models that we use to forecast the weather have gotten more detailed, more more accurate, can see further in advance.

So we can see some of these windy days again, the three to five days, sometimes even seven days in advance, we can start identifying, hey, this is gonna be a windy day. So be careful kind of situation.

We have the power of what we call probabilistic information where we're able to take let's say 100 different models, run them all at the same time, little tweaks and things here and there and say what percent of those models show red flag conditions on Tuesday as an example. And then we can give that confidence level to the fire agency saying well, hey, 80% of our models are showing red flag days conditions on Tuesday.

Pretty high confidence that we're gonna see that. And so they can take that information and then start staffing up and getting ready for those days.

Wow, that is great information.

It's a cool time to be in the science. I'm not gonna lie.

As a meteorologist, the last 10, 15 years have been awesome just to see the advance of technology and the advance of communication methods to get the word out, text message, satellite communication. They're starting to now ping via satellite flashwood warnings into the Grand Canyon for people that don't have cell phone coverage.

So it's really cool time folks.

You cannot see Chris face, but I give away a lot of free ice cream cones to kids and the look on their face, it's the same look that you're having about this. And this couldn't have been a better job for you as we need people like you now, people like us and listeners out there.

What should people actually when a red flag warning is issued?

So these are days. There's a number of things that anybody can do, especially if you live in a fire prone area, the wildland urban interface, the WUE as we call it.

One is just, it's an opportunity for you to review your preparedness and your evacuation readiness. Especially on those pds, those particularly dangerous situation red flag days where it's really windy.

If you get an evacuation message, you may only have minutes to respond. So that morning when you wake up, you're having your coffee, it's a red flag day, okay? Hey, where's my go bag? How full is the car on gas?

Is the cell phone? Do I have a charger? Just things like that, Just so that you're ready to go. Your kids, are they going to be in a place where they'll be safe?

Things like that. The other thing is, I have to say is we all make mistakes in day to day life and it's no different. You do something that creates a spark, right?

You're out doing yard work or you're doing welding or something like that and it creates a spark and on a normal day it Might start a fire and the fire department might come out, all that stuff. But it's not going to just blow up out of control on a red flag day. Unfortunately, those tiny mistakes do blow up out of control really quickly.

So a lot of fires start from again, accidental yard work, sparks, welding, dragging chains on the ground. A lot of people here have boats. Those chains sometimes drag on the ground.

And honestly, a lot of fires will start and you'll kind of see a progression along a roadway. Oh, that was probably somebody dragging chains. So little things like that on a red flag day can create large fires out of control.

So just checking things of that nature is important.

Yeah, I'm going to jump in here because I've almost 20 years out there on the scene reporting on these fires. I had two situations, Chris.

One was a father was having a birthday party for his daughter, and they had s' mores in the middle of the day in the residential neighborhood. And it just took off through the neighborhood. And we were on top of that one, had another one just down the road here on Glenshire Drive.

It was a natural started fire. But then I will never forget this.

I was standing there at the point of origin reporting, and a guy smiled at me and waved and flicked his cigarette butt right into it. How's that, Chris?

That's perhaps not being very situationally aware. No, it wasn't.

And I will tell you that at that moment, I was like, oh, my goodness, we have a situation. People just don't understand.

No, they don't get that tiny decision. Seemingly harmless, could definitely start a fire. But especially on a windy red flag day, it's gonna go quickly.

You know, another one thing that just sort of popped into my mind that creates some fires or what we call holdovers, where if you have a lightning outbreak, lightning hits a tree, right. You know, probably damages it, shatters it, all that stuff. Actually, it can kind of smolder in there inside the tree.

There's a little fire going on inside the tree. And it can last days, even a couple weeks, just sort of sitting there smoldering. And then you get a windy day, Boom.

All of a sudden, you got yourself a big fire on your hands. So we alert fire agencies to that. That scenario where we have lightning followed by maybe two days later of wind.

That's what we call the holdover scenario. So that's another one. We actually see everyone every now and then up here in the Sierra.

Oh, I was on one. And I'll just give you the example of it. We had the lightning about four to five days before off Highway 89, going into Olympic Valley.

I was at my other job and I was in the valley. And all of a sudden off the deck over the top of head wall dropping out of the sky was the big J and the smoke was coming.

And it was on a holdover fire that was on the ridge. It had burned in the roots for four to five days.

And next thing we know, we had the winds and we had a fire blowing directly at Olympic valley off Highway 89. So these are for real situations, folks. So take it for real and make sure that you pay attention when you're.

Out there and tell somebody too. Let's say you're out trail running or hiking and you come across an unexplained, you know, something smoldering here.

And this doesn't look right, it doesn't look recorded because that might be the thing that blows up and creates a huge firestorm.

You could be the one who's catching the smoke actually coming out of the dirt on trail. That's why we always say during a lot of our reports, if you see something, say something.

It's not, you know, do not be embarrassed and do not feel stupid. It's really important to speak up because there are very unexplainable things that are going on that we just don't have in our everyday life.

Yep.

So.

Yep.

Okay, let's talk about tools. One of the tools that here at the station is, is all the technology. I don't have to worry about jumping in a fire bag.

I don't have to worry about my yellow suit no more. I don't have to worry about getting out on the front line of the fires. But what can the listeners do to find hyper local fire risk information now?

Excellent question. And that's ultimately, every decision is very personal. You want even just a weather forecast, you're like, what's it gonna be outside of my door?

I don't necessarily care what it's gonna be necessarily in Reno. I'm not going there. But hey, what's it gonna be doing here outside my door? And so the same applies to fire information as well.

So the weather service weather forecasts, those are, you know, the resolution of those generally is within a few miles resolution of where you're located. It's not going to be like street level information or things like that.

Where you can find that information for fire risk is talking to your local emergency manager. And those are people who talk to all the experts and come up with hazard maps and risk maps for your community.

So you can make informed decisions of how prone are you to. To fire risk. Some of it's pretty obvious. You know, you look out your house and you got a bunch of trees around you.

I'm safe to say you're probably in a high hazard area for wildland fire, things like that.

Okay, microclimates.

Micro. Yep.

And we see that during the winter, right, there's microclimates. It'll snow here, it won't snow there. Same idea with fire, am I correct?

Absolutely. In fact, fire weather is so dominated by topography, terrain aspects. You know, where is the fire on the mountain? Is it at the top, the mid slope?

Is it in the valley? All that dominates exactly what the fires are gonna do and what the winds are gonna do.

One of the things that we're seeing with the changing climate patterns is, especially at night, is those dry, breezy conditions are continuing later into the night than they did 10, 20, 30 years ago. So let's say you get a fire established on what we call the mid slope of a mountain ridge, right?

Let's say 1,000ft above the valley floor or something like that. That's an area, what we call the thermal belt, where it actually stays warmer and drier and breezier all night to begin with.

But it's actually more pronounced now than again, it was a couple decades ago. So that fire is going to continue active longer into the nighttime hours than maybe it traditionally had.

So that's an example of the topography and how that affects fire behavior, microclimates, all that jazz.

That's a great insight.

I've never really thought about it sitting right up in that area, how it's kind of changed now, folks, they're all getting their downloads on their phones and their apps. And what to do. We have tahoalerts.com, which they should have on there, which is going to drive you to your area.

Because there's a lot of folks working off Genesis, there's some working off code Red, But Tahoe alerts in our zone is bringing everybody together. You have any information on those at all that you want to backfill on that?

So I think the. You know, I can't necessarily vouch for a specific alerting methodology, but what I will say is redundancy. Have multiple means of getting alerts.

So don't rely on just one app, maybe have two. Don't rely on just one radio station. Maybe have two.

You know, just have a backup mean, so you can confirm, oh, gosh, this sounds really bad, but that seems too bad. To be true, I need to confirm this. And then, you know, you go to another source. Oh, wow. Yeah. Sure enough, that is true.

And we see that with tornadoes, too.

Honestly, in the south and the Midwest, people will get a tornado warning that's barreling toward them, but they won't necessarily act until they get that secondary confirmation, either with their eyes or with another source or a family member. Hey, are you okay there? Then they'll act on it. So, same thing here with fires. Have multiple sources of alerts.

Yeah. And when we're talking about sources, these are verified sources. We want to make sure they are verified.

These are active people who are out there on the front lines, first responders, people in the business, not that influencer. We've seen it too many times.

You want those folks like Truckee Fire involved, Truckee Police, you want the Tahoe alerts, and then you want to just cross reference it all. You know, you have a situation. And you said radio as well. Make sure you have a couple radio stations on there. Because anything could happen.

You know, it's.

It's something where, you know, especially when it comes to evacuations, you have to listen to the most official word possible, because if you drive in the wrong direction, that ain't going to be good. And so you got to, you know, make sure and listen to that.

I will say, one app that I use, in addition to all the ones that you mentioned that, that I love, and we actually use it at the weather service just for situational awareness, is Watch Duty. That's for fires.

It's a whole volunteer network that are constantly listening to the scanners and everything, and they're uploading new information constantly on fires. You can see the perimeters, the maps and stuff. So that's definitely one that I. Oh,.

That's a great one. Yeah, that's a great one. Because the information is coming real time.

Real time, exactly.

And that takes me back to the Davis fire. I had so many people going, well, why isn't there more information from our news stations?

Because these folks are fighting fires, and they're only going to bring you that information. On the shift change every 12 hours is when you get the download of information. And that's what the key thing I like about Watch Duty is. And others.

You can actually watch the planes flying around, too.

Yeah. And that's important because, you know, it's sometimes, especially when there's a red Flag day, you know, the winds are driving that fire.

It's evolving quickly. You may have to make decisions quickly. You can't necessarily wait 12 hours for to make a decision.

And everybody has their own risk tolerance when it comes to evacuation, stuff like that. Personally, I'm probably a little more risk averse. I'll probably take action sooner than another person who might decide to wait a little bit longer.

It's just everybody has their own risk tolerance levels.

Okay, I think you answered this earlier for me, but I just want to go. So after all this, are red flag warnings becoming more common?

You know, I would say not necessarily. The one thing about red flag days in the Truckee Tahoe, Reno area is they're highly variable from year to year to year.

We've had 17 days of red flag conditions in a given summer. So it's highly variable.

That is a big one. Okay, climate change, I know this. These words trigger people. But no matter what, is it shifting the fire risk landscape?

So we talked already about how it can affect a fire on a daily scale because they're continuing later into the night because those conditions are so dry and breezy. But the other thing is also looking at the fire season. The fire seasons are longer, especially at the tail end.

You know, when I first moved to Reno, you know, by October, you're pretty much done. You know, you had your first wetting rain. You know, everything was good. Even had some snow on the peaks and stuff.

And to be sure, we have years that are like that. But generally the fire seasons are going into October, even into November.

So what you're having here is those critically dry fuels, vegetation into autumn is now overlapping with some of those very early season winter storms that often bring more wind than rain. That is not a good combination. That's where you get your PDS red flag days.

That's where you get your wind gusts of 50, 60 miles an hour onto vegetation that is critically dry from the summer heat. So that is one thing that we have seen just in the last 10, 20 years is a shift toward those autumn big fires.

I like that you use the word autumn. Okay, yours sparked a question in me. And so does the word climate change. Do these large catastrophic wildfires, do they add to the climate change?

You know, we're starting to shift a little outside my lane. You know, I'm trying to think like. And I'll readily admit if I don't know something, I'll definitely admit it.

But, you know, you think about volcanoes erupting, you know, just how much ash and sulfur dioxide goes into the atmosphere from those. And those have been shown, you know, pinatubo back in the early 90s, I think it was, did actually cool the global atmosphere for some time afterward.

So I can't say they don't necessarily cause changes, but I just can't answer that definitively. What I will say is the smoke does affect local temperatures during the fire. So if we have really smoky days, it does tend to cool.

The high temperatures keeps a little bit of that sun out of the, from hitting the ground, so we don't warm up as much. But what's interesting, we actually cool off just as normal at night. It doesn't act like an insulating blanket like clouds do on a, on a fire.

On a smoky day, we might only Instead of hitting 90, we'll hit 85. But at night we'll still dip to 50 degrees regardless.

Crazy.

It's just some of the physics behind how smoke behaves in the atmosphere.

Yeah, it's like he's getting that ice cream.

There we go. That's it.

If you were sitting here, you would just, you'd look at him and this is the guy. All right. We talked about these new tools and alerts, developing fire weather watches and predictive modeling.

Is there one that you're super excited about? You said you could run 100 different versions of a Fire with AI now.

Yeah. I think that's honestly the exciting part is the influence of AI in weather prediction.

Traditionally, weather models involved tons of calculus level equations. You'd have to have these supercomputers. Takes a lot of resources, money as well.

AI promises to be way more efficient in terms of the number crunching. It's able to look at more pattern recognition and be like, okay, here's what the jet stream is doing. Here's where the cold front is. Okay.

Generally this is what happens when we have that pattern coming together at this time of year. That's just a basic example of that. But it is coming just like AI is influencing a lot of other aspects of society. Meteorology is no different.

Google's even running AI models. The European center is running AI models. The American Weather Service is running AI models. So it's there.

So I think what's cool about that is it promises to deliver weather information a lot more quickly than traditional computer models, which can take several hours to run.

It's been a heck of a learning situation for myself. And I've been doing this for a while. You just keep bringing more information.

All right, what is the one message, Chris, that you want everyone listening to?

Remember, you know, I think we've hit it a few times. JD Is it does not take a red flag data necessarily yield a destructive wildfire.

You know, unfortunately, if a fire starts the wrong place at the wrong time, and maybe you just have normal summer zephyr winds, 20 miles an hour, that might be enough to create a destructive wildfire. But definitely, if you hear red flag warning on your app or you just hear it on the radio or social media, take notice of that.

This is your chance to just do a little once over on your preparation for a wildfire evacuation situation. So I think that's the key message. I personally do that every time we issue a red flag warning.

I'm like, okay, we live in sparks, so we're not in a huge wooey. But it's close enough where I'm like, all right, so are my gutters clean? Right. Because embers get into the gutters and that's going to start a fire.

Right. Things like that. Just basic, simple things like that can help.

Thank you so much. Chris Smallcomb, National Weather Service, helping us stay safe and learning about red flag readiness.

I appreciate you, your knowledge, and I feel a connection. Our first assignment was the Angora fire.

When you got here, that was it. Definitely. Well, appreciate the invite, J.D. And of course, we'll talk again soon.

You got it. I'm JD Haas, your 101.5 community conversations on wildfire host. Stay safe, stay informed, and stay ready.

This message provided by Truckee Fire as part of the Measure T Community Wildfire Prevention Fund.