Taylor Grace - February 9

Weather and Climate Systems

Precursor Heat Wave Events to the March 2017 Wildfires across the Southern Great Plains

Taylor Grace

Wednesday, February 9

3:00 PM

Google Meet

The State of Oklahoma has experienced anomalously warmer periods during the 2021-2022 winter season. To date, literature has predominantly studied heat waves during warmer months (i.e., May and September); however, heat waves can occur throughout the year under the definition of a relative threshold (e.g., 90th percentile). A more suitable definition for winter-time heat waves are thermal shocks. Thermal shock events pose significant risk to both agricultural and human welfare, thus an important area of study. This work comprises of two parts: (1) a spatial examination of heat wave events across the Southern Great Plains (SGP) from 1979 to 2019, and (2) a case study featuring the 2017 March wildfires within the SGP. The first study utilizes the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) dataset to determine heat wave events when daily maximum and minimum 2-m temperatures were above the 90th percentile for at least 3 consecutive days. Heat wave events were further separated into four seasons: Spring (MAM), Summer (JJA), Fall (SON), and Winter (DJF), in order to execute a trend analysis for each state within the SGP. Results suggest that the frequency is not only increasing for all four seasons, but several states also experienced a similar magnitude of an increasing trend of thermal shock events as summer season heat wave events. In the second part of this study, precursor heat wave events were shown to have occurred from November 2016 through April 2017 aiding the wildfires responsible for burning a substantial amount of acres in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. An analysis of precipitation and temperature anomalies leading up to March of 2017 explains how the atmospheric conditions provided an ideal situation to fuel the wildfires in 2017 across the SGP.