 Staying informed on fire weather conditions and forecasts is a pretty basic concept, but really how easy is it? You and your crew are bombarded with information and indicators regarding your current fire environment. I mean, you definitely need to know what your fire is doing at all times, but awareness alone is just the beginning. Your ability to focus on what is important and filter what is not will allow you to interpret and convert it into something useful. Scott Durval is a news meteorologist in Boise, Idaho. He will talk to you about some of the most basic elements of sky-watching and the importance of simply raising your eyes to the sky and making frequent, thoughtful observations. When it's 100 degrees in the summertime, what's causing the air to rise is the sun comes up in the morning, it heats the ground, the sun does not heat the air, the sun heats the ground, it heats solid objects and the solid objects touching the air, the ground it's touching the air and that air then gets warm, like a radiator, warms that air and then that layer of air rises and then cool air comes down to replace it and that air warms up and it rises. And that's the mixing that occurs during the day that we talked about when you when you talk about a fire where the forecast mixing, the air is mixing and then it continues to rise. Rising air will then cool as the air pressure drops. There's no air at the top of the atmosphere, so we know as the air rises the pressure is dropping and so the temperature drops and the air cools and when it cools far enough it hits its dew point and then a cloud forms. If you have more moisture near the ground, you only have to take that air and bring it up a shorter distance and you'll get a cloud forming. If it's extremely dry, the temperature and dew point are very, very far apart, the humidity is very low and so you take this air and you have to make it rise higher and higher and higher as that temperature falls, it has to fall further and further and you have to make the air go higher and higher before you can get a cloud to form. And the reason storms will form over the mountains first is because it's an elevated heat source. The Sun is heating the ground in a place where it's cooler and the ambient air next to it and so it doesn't take the air to, it doesn't have to rise as far to get a cloud to form. That's why clouds will form right over the mountains earlier in the day as opposed to waiting for the Sun to mix that air all the way up to this point where it can mix it up right on this mountain side and thereby this particular picture here is a very unstable afternoon. You can already see the rain falling as we're looking north into the mountains. Obviously we're seeing a very dark cloud here. You can see the lifting condensation level, that flat bottom to the cloud and you're going to see the rain starting in the right-hand side of the picture there at about 420. You'll see the clouds start to ripple and that moisture just come ringing right out of the cloud out of the thunderstorm. We'll see it right here on the right and with that you get a big burst of wind which knocked my camera over which is a good indicator that that was a pretty strong storm system. This is another indicator showing the Sun is now heating the ground and you have vertical development of the clouds. You can see the puffy nature to the clouds. The Sun heats the ground. The warm air rises, makes those clouds. Now the Sun is going down. The heat source is disappearing. As the heat source disappears the clouds just disappear because the only thing that's causing that moisture to condense is the lifting of the air and the lifting of the air has disappeared. So we might have had a fire weather forecast that said that nothing's going to happen maybe today or tomorrow but maybe we've got some indications that we're going to start bringing more moisture in. And then one morning you wake up and you start to see these low clouds. They're not real big in puffy but they have a puffy nature to them but that's smaller and there's little clusters of puffy clouds. And what you're seeing here is Altocumulus Castellatus or Acus. That's a sign that okay we've got an unstable day here this is a day that I really need to be paying attention in the afternoon watching for the vertical development of storms. May not occur right over us. We may have one coming in but that's a sign the atmosphere is ready. It's got enough moisture and it's unstable that it could be ready to fire in the afternoon. One of the things that's most important obviously wind is a huge deal with fire. Wind is pretty much everything and how is the weather going to impact the wind and hit the fire behavior. This particular loop was from a few years ago but it really shows Virga. Now Virga is when rain falls from a cloud and doesn't reach the ground. This particular one you can see some drops reaching our camera but this is a good indicator showing what Virga looks like and it basically looks like the cloud is it doesn't have a flat bottom anymore. You can see the rain hanging out of the cloud. It looks like the cloud is being stretched down to the ground. That is so vital because around these locations you can get very gusty winds. What's happening is the air is being cooled by that rain that's falling. That rain is not reaching the ground it's evaporating because the air is so dry and so that evaporating air then cools and that cool rush of air comes rushing down to the ground then can shoot out in all directions. Pretty much every thunderstorm is going to get some type of outflow boundary in the summer. They may be weak, they may dissipate, some of them will hold together with 40 mile an hour winds for over 100 miles. Typically if you're out near a fire, a burned area or in the open desert there's going to be a very large dust cloud and you'll see it right along the ground. The sky will be darkening just above the ground and that's another thing to look for. And if you see that, there's wind coming very very soon within minutes. Let's talk a little bit about cold fronts approaching. This particular that we're going to see, this particular cold front happened in the winter time but watch how everything is coming towards us. We're looking towards the south and so clouds and weather are coming towards us but in the distance you can see the lower level clouds beginning to develop a lot more moisture and watch this rapid shift of the wind and that flag showing up in the UiHe Plaza there shifting directions and now we have a strong westerly wind. This is in quick motion but when you are watching this in the field when you see clouds that are coming towards you and they start to shift directions then you know you've got a sign of a potential cold front coming through. In the summertime it's either going to be so dry that you're not going to have any indication that a cold front is coming through and you're just going to get a wind shift and that can be very dangerous because you have no indication at all. From a clear blue sky you get a wind shift usually from the north and west. Sometimes you'll get thunderstorms forming on the edge of a cold front and obviously that's a little more indication you know something's coming. If you hear a forecast of a cold front that's supposed to come through during the afternoon chances are it's going to come through. It's just a matter of when it's going to happen and you really need to be aware of that. The sky could stay completely blue. If it's dry and it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you don't see any little puffy cumulus clouds developing on the ridge tops that means it's so dry you're probably not going to get any cloud cover whatsoever. A front could come through just with a wind shift and a wind picking up. So when I walk out outside I'm always looking out. Sometimes I'll go to the beach and people are laying out in the sun and then a cloud will move in front of the sun and they'll get up and they'll kind of look around like this wondering where the sun is. They don't even look up. People just do not observe the sky. Every day go outside and just observe what's going on in the sky and you'll just learn and learn and learn because then you'll have, oh boy we've got this heavy rain. I noticed this morning we had such and such and it'll just start to click. I can't stress enough that as you go out you get your briefing. Anytime you get a chance to get more information you'll want to keep doing it because it just makes your forecast that much more accurate. The next day's forecast is this good and then the next days day two and day three and day four and day five drops off in time. And so what makes those drop off is that it's too far away. You want to get that very latest information and constantly be looking at the sky to see if you can get some information yourself. We will now view some weather loops and let you consider what they mean and share them with your group.