Brace Yourselves for Snaptember

I turned on the heat this week for the first time since spring. Tuesday started out mild, damp, and overcast here in Seattle — the kind of weather the city still conjures in the popular imagination, even if about 50 days a year now are warmer than they used to be because of climate change. Summers here may be getting longer, but this morning felt truly like fall, and in the uninsulated shed where I do most of my writing, I briefly turned on the space heater to stave off the nip.

The same slow-moving low-pressure system responsible for the moody weather in the Puget Sound region will also go far in curbing the state’s wildfires, per Tuesday’s update to the National Wildland Significant Fire Potential Outlook. It’s almost obscenely good luck: September is historically one of the worst times of year for wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, after the summer’s high temperatures have dried out all the fuels but before the autumn rains arrive.

Worse still, though, is the tax on wildland firefighters. They call the month “Snaptember” because the physical and mental health effects of a long firefighting season begin to catch up with the more than 21,000 of them currently on assignment. That is especially true in a year like 2026, the worst fire season in the Pacific Northwest in 30 years. Nationwide, more than 8.2 million acres have burned, 164% of the 10-year average for this point in the year. The National Preparedness Level has sat at its highest level, 5, since mid-July, meaning that fire resources, personnel, and the seasonal hires who make up the bulk of the workforce are stretched to their absolute limit. There is no breathing room — 68 fires ignited yesterday alone, following 140 new ignitions on Monday. Some of the crews fighting the country’s biggest fires have come from as far away as New Zealand to help out.

The good news: The wet start to the month will drop the Pacific Northwest from above-average to normal fire potential for the first half of September, offering a much-needed break. But the brief weather pattern won’t undo August’s damage, including below-average rainfall across the region and the spread of “exceptional drought.” Temperatures ran as much as 8 degrees above average in parts of Oregon, and in southwest Idaho, an abundance of dried juniper, grasses, and shrubs has created, in fire-industry parlance, “an above-average fully cured fine fuel crop” — in normal terms, that means there’s a lot of tinder ready to burn. The entire state of Washington is under a precautionary burn ban until the end of the month.

What follows could be truly nasty. “Outlooks favor above-normal temperatures with no indication of a sustained wet pattern, meaning drying may quickly resume once the early September systems depart,” Tuesday’s report reads. Making matters worse, “Historical analogs and past transitions into El Niño,” such as the one we’re in now, “suggest an elevated likelihood of at least one moderately strong east‑wind day in September, further reinforcing opportunity for new significant fires to arise when lightning or human ignitions occur.” A similar situation — east, downslope winds and summer-cured dry fuels — compounded into the disastrous September fires of 2020, which burned over 11% of the entire Oregon Cascades ecoregion. (While El Niño historically produces above-average temperatures and lower rainfall in the Northwest in the fall, the greatest impacts will like come after the report’s outlook period.)

Drought now covers 57% of the country, and other regions could also pop off this month, further drawing on limited resources. The report highlighted northern California, the southern Plains, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and Florida as other regions with above-average fire potential heading into September. In the Southern Area in particular, which includes Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and southwestern Alabama, the suppressed Atlantic hurricane season has resulted in extreme drought “second only to the last very strong El Niño of 2015,” the report found. Above-average significant fire potential could “very well continue” as late as November.

By then, at least, the Northwest will have “probabilities for more organized storm systems,” particularly beginning in the second half of October, when precipitation will hopefully pick back up. Imagine that: Looking forward to the winter drizzle, which was once the great drawback of living in the Northwest.

But by the time Snaptember is through with us, I worry that those cold, dark, wet days of December will feel far away yet.