The Grand Canyon fire exploded in size, catching officials off guard. Why?
But then a dangerous shift in the weather occurred, turning the seemingly low-risk fire into a fast-moving blaze that jumped containment lines and torched dozens of buildings in the park over the weekend, including a historic lodge.
What fueled the explosive growth of the Dragon Bravo Fire was a mix of gusty winds, dry air and above-normal heat – weather conditions experts described as atypical for this time of year, when monsoonal moisture typically tamps down wildfire risk across Arizona.
'It was a break in the monsoon pattern,' Robert Rickey, a science and operations officer with the National Weather Service, told The Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network. 'Rather than having daily afternoon showers, we had a period of several days without that. Instead, we had extremely dry, warm conditions.'
Since its rapid expansion over the weekend, the wildfire has torched over 14 square miles of land, making it one of the largest wildfires to break out in a national park since 2021. No one has been injured as the North Rim and nearby communities were evacuated late last week because of a separate fire. Officials also shut down the North Rim – which receives only 10% of all park visitors – for the rest of the year.
In recent days, members of the state's congressional delegation and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs criticized the National Park Service's decision to initially treat the fire as a controlled burn – a practice that's regularly employed to reduce wildfire risks and promote healthy plant growth.
The park service has said the wildfire was "expertly handled," blaming "historic" winds for the blaze's explosive growth and highlighting the evacuation of hundreds of residents, tourists and park employees.
More: The Dragon Bravo Fire was unremarkable as it burned slowly over days — then the winds came
How the weather fueled the Grand Canyon wildfire
After the fire started on July 4, the National Park Service decided to manage the blaze as a controlled burn to benefit the land. But by July 10, the threat of expansion set in as a dry trough of low pressure passed over northern Arizona, pushing out monsoon moisture and bringing in drier air and gusty winds.
Relative humidity dropped into the single digits. The winds shifted, blowing 20 mph from the west and northwest, fanning the flames and driving them across the North Rim. Temperatures climbed to the upper 80s and low 90s, about 10 degrees above average for this time of year.
On Friday, July 11, the fire expanded by more than eight times its size. The rapid growth continued Saturday night as peak winds around 40 mph pushed the flames to buildings and a row of cabins that firefighters had sought to protect.
The combination of weather conditions is unusual during the region's monsoon season, which officially runs from June 15 to Sept. 30, as heavy moisture and thunderstorms drive up humidity levels and limit the risk of wildfires.
"During the monsoon season, we usually have high pressure sitting in place so we're not often dealing with strong west or northwest wind events," Rickey said. "This pattern just happened to line up in a way that really fueled the fire.'
Should fire officials have attacked the blaze sooner?
The "contain/confine" strategy that the National Park Service employed in the initial days of the wildfire is not uncommon, especially in national forests, said Susan Prichard, a research scientist specializing in wildfire ecology and management at the University of Washington.
Prichard said such a decision is reached through extensive calculation, with authorities employing risk models and simulations to analyze the potential fire spread. If it's considered low-risk, fire managers will let a wildfire burn so it can chip away at fire fuels and limit the danger of future blazes.
On the Grand Canyon's North Rim, the method worked for several days until gusty winds combined with low humidity and high temperatures to set the stage for extreme fire growth.
"I feel bad for the managers here, because unfortunately the winds were not as predictable as we wish and they got an outlier event," Prichard said. She added that research supports the use of "let-it-burn" practices but said the damaging wildfire and its handling should be investigated.
"Fire is a blunt tool so everything is risky," she said. "But when there's an outcome that's so far from what was expected, we need to learn from it."
As fire rages on, pressure mounts over federal wildfire response
The Dragon Bravo Fire has continued to grow in recent days but fire officials are hopeful that thunderstorms this week will help tamp down the flames.
Officials said over 350 emergency responders were working in shifts with hand crews and bulldozers, setting up containment lines as they seek to "hold the fire to as small a perimeter as possible" and protect other buildings on the North Rim. As of Wednesday, July 16, the fire remained at 0% containment.
Meanwhile, both sides of the political aisle have demanded an investigation into the National Park Service's response to the fire.
Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego in a joint letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum requested a probe of why the blaze was initially treated as a controlled burn. And Republican Reps. Eli Crane and Paul Gosar pledged support for an investigation into the agency's wildfire response. Their demands came after the state governor called on the federal government to look into the matter.
"The destruction of the Grand Canyon Lodge was a tragedy and Arizonans deserve answers," Hobbs said.
Contributing: Perry Vandell and Caitlin McGlade, Arizona Republic
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WIRED
an hour ago
- WIRED
Private Companies Are Now Gathering Weather Data for NOAA
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The Alaska office was one of about a dozen to suspend or scale back balloon launches in response to deep staffing cuts instituted by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Critics claim that the cuts have weakened the NWS's forecasting capacity as hurricane season bears down and extreme weather events, like the floods that ripped through Texas, claim lives and destroy property. As the beleaguered weather service struggles to maintain its forecasting and other services, it's leaning on private companies to pick up the slack. For example, WindBorne, which is backed by Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on investing in companies with innovative business models and technologies, is opening five new balloon launch sites in the US this year as it expands its work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the NWS. 'We're flying more balloons every day and collecting more observations to help improve forecasts in light of some of these systems going down,' said John Dean, WindBorne's cofounder and CEO. Sofar Ocean, Black Swift Technologies, and Saildrone are among other startups with innovative technologies and AI forecasting models that are increasingly supplying NOAA with critical atmospheric and oceanic data through its Mesonet Program. Such collaboration isn't new, but former NOAA officials worry that the current administration, with its zeal for privatization, will jettison core federal observing systems and rely instead on private sector data to forecast the weather. While they lauded the companies' innovations, they said that NOAA must maintain ownership of its 'backbone' data assets like weather balloons to ensure public safety and maintain the historical climate record. New technologies, they said, should supplement NOAA's core data collection efforts rather than replace them wholesale. 'NOAA has always had a robust relationship with the private sector exactly for the sorts of things that WindBorne does,' like innovate and supply data, said Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist and former NOAA spokesperson who is now media director at Climate Central. Under the current administration, however, 'the concern is, what is it going to replace?' If private services take the place of, rather than supplement, the agency's core data assets, that could prove problematic, because 'less data is bad,' he said. 'Are we actually saving money or just giving taxpayer dollars to a private company?' Data as a Service In the past NOAA bought sensors and hardware from companies with promising innovations to bring the technology in house. More recently, it's adopted a model of 'data as a service,' in which it buys data from companies that maintain their own hardware and intellectual property rights. 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Agency dependence on one company for critical services or data is especially worrisome for Brad Colman, a private meteorologist who previously worked at NOAA. 'It's a vulnerable position because you now have data that you have built your forecasting system around,' he said. The company could demand more money, which could limit NOAA's ability to invest elsewhere, or have the business challenges it faces affect the product it provides the government. 'There's a contradictory nature to what this administration is doing, advocating for private-sector delivery of data and then removing a third of the weather service.' Data ownership is another crucial concern. Historically, NOAA has strived to make the commercial data it buys freely available to anyone who wants to use it for forecasting or research, said Mary Glackin, a former high-ranking official at NOAA who also worked at the Weather Company. That's best for public safety, she said.'There is no weather forecast that's produced in this country that isn't dependent on NOAA,' she said. But free and open data licensing agreements can be costly for the government, and companies often want to retain some data to sell to private buyers. In those situations, NOAA may buy data for its own purposes but withhold it from forecasters outside the agency for a set period. The first Trump administration showed a willingness to choose this latter option. A contract negotiated in 2020 with a company that had what many considered a superior hurricane forecasting model, for instance, constrained NOAA from publicly releasing the forecasts for five years, drawing criticism from hurricane specialists and private forecasters. WindBorne's Innovation WindBorne's AI-guided balloons stay aloft for months and collect vastly more data in the upper atmosphere than traditional weather balloons, which only fly for about two hours before popping and descending back to earth. Called radiosondes, after the instruments they carry, traditional weather balloons cover just a fraction of the Earth, because it is logistically challenging to launch and receive data from them over the oceans and in remote areas. WindBorne's weather balloons collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, across a horizontal expanse. Photograph: WindBorne Systems WindBorne's balloons, in contrast, can collect and distribute data from remote regions. That makes them more adaptive, and especially useful for monitoring atmospheric rivers that bring extreme precipitation to coastal regions, said Glackin. 'I'd like to see them in the suite of observing systems.' The company deploys about 100 balloons from six launch sites globally, a fraction of the 92 launch sites operated by NOAA, but it aims to expand to launch up to 10,000 balloons globally over the next five years, Dean said. Windborne's data is less costly than radiosonde data 'on a per observation or per station basis,' Curtis Marshall, the director of the Commercial Data Program for the NWS, wrote in an email. And while its data is now free and open to the public, as the company expands, it wants to hold back some of the information it gathers for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers, Dean said. That data would no longer be useful to other forecasters. Radiosondes' Old School Technology is Difficult to Replace Radiosondes collect one vertical profile—a line from ground level to the point where the balloon explodes—of data in the atmosphere, which is important for understanding climate change signals. 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