Reading the Ashes

What Oregon’s fire record says about the 2026 season

Author

Duncan Lawrence

Published

June 8, 2026

Reading the Ashes

What Oregon’s fire record says about the 2026 season

It might be nice if the records could say something simple, something predictable. Something like El Niño is coming, snowpack is low, Oregon is lined up for a bad fire year.

But fire dynamics are more complicated than that.

Dry years do not automatically create bad fire seasons. A severe fire season needs several pieces to line up at the same time: available fuel, dry fuel, an ignition source, continuous fuel, and a failure to catch the fire before it grows beyond initial attack.

A dry year after a recent large burn may not behave the same way as a dry year after several productive growing seasons. If the landscape already burned, there may be less continuous fuel left to carry the next fire. Dryness still matters, but it may not have much to work with. On the other hand, a run of wet or mild years can grow grasses, brush, and understory vegetation. If that new fuel is followed by poor snowpack, early drying, heat, wind, and human or lightning ignitions, the landscape changes from green growth into available fuel.

That is the frame of this project. I am not treating fire season as a single-variable problem. El Niño, La Niña, drought, and snowpack are not magic forecast buttons.

The project uses ODF fire occurrence records, MTBS burned-area boundaries, Oregon drought records, and NOAA climate division data. The assignment asks for a real data-supported story, not simulated data, and it explicitly leaves room for multiple real sources when one source cannot tell the whole story by itself.

Four data sources

Each source explains one piece of the fire system.

ODF

Where fires started, estimated acres, cause, county, and coordinates.

MTBS

Where large fires left burned-area footprints.

Drought Monitor

How much statewide drought pressure was on Oregon each season.

NOAA climate

Temperature, precipitation, and Palmer drought context.

2026 snowpack: already dry enough to respect

How 2026 is setting up: much of the West is snow-poor, Oregon, along with nearly every western states measured Snow Water is thin, and the season is starting with less cushion than normal.

The concern with low snowpack is delayed water. When it is low or melts early, the landscape loses part of its late-spring and early-summer moisture buffer. Soils dry sooner, live fuels cure earlier, and mid- to upper-elevation fuels can become available ahead of schedule.

The practical version is low snowpack does not guarantee huge fires; but it removes the buffer. After that, the season depends on fuels, ignitions, wind, heat, overnight recovery, and whether starts are caught before they become campaign fires.

This bar plot summarizes fire-season drought pressure by year. I used the U.s. Drought Monitor’s Drought Severity and Coverage Index (DSCI) for Oregon as a simple seasonal pressure gauge. The DSCI scale (our y axis) runs roughly from 0-500 with, 0 being no drought, 300 being severe, and 500 being exceptional drought. It does not tell us where a spark lands, but it helps describe the state of the general landscapes ability to nurture a spark.

Starts and acres are different beasts

This indexed line plot puts starts, large-fire acres, and drought pressure on the same relative scale. between ODF ignition count and MTBS large-fire acres is only 0.02. +1 perfect correlation, 0 no clear relationship, -1 inversely correlated

2006 had the most ODF-recorded ignitions in this file, with 1,342 starts. But the biggest MTBS burned-area year was 2024, with about 1.6 million acres in large-fire burned areas. Those are related fire seasons, but they are not the same story.

This scatter plot shows the same point another way. A fire start is an event. Acres burned are a consequence. The consequence needs wind, fuel, terrain, timing, access, suppression conditions, and sometimes just bad luck stacked in the same window.

Where the fires start

Where the land actually burned

This polygon map changes the picture. MTBS does not map every tiny start; it maps larger burned areas and severity. That makes it a better companion to ODF points than another ignition table would be. ODF tells us where fires start; MTBS tells us where large fires left a footprint.

A dot can be a quarter-acre. A polygon can be 100’s of thousands of acres.

Left side: starts. Right side: large burned-area footprints. Watch how a year can have starts scattered around the ODF map while the burned acreage piles up in different geographies. You can see the lack of fire starts documentation in the South East clearly.

This animated cartogram distorts Oregon counties by ODF estimated acres burned each year. This version is not normalized by county size; it shows raw acreage or “where did the most acres burn?” rather than “what percent of each county burned?”

Instead of total acres,the normalized version distorts counties by burned acres per 1,000 square miles. This is useful whencomparing burn pressure relative to county size instead of letting large counties dominate the picture.

Cause matters, but it’s not the whole season

This stacked bar plot shows ignition source by year. Human starts dominate the count in most years, which points toward prevention: equipment use, debris burning, escaped burns, vehicles, juveniles, miscellaneous human causes. Behaviors that can be somewhat mitigated rules, timing, and enforcement.

But again, ignition source is not the whole ending. Lightning can own fewer starts and still matter hard if it arrives in a dry, windy window over rough country.

This heat map shows where ODF acreage keeps concentrating across time. Each row is a county, each column is a year, and brighter cells mean more estimated acres burned on a log scale. It helps separate one-off bad years from repeated pressure: some counties show up again and again, while other counties spike because one large fire bent the year.

The drought signal is useful. It is not a crystal ball.

This scatter plot compares fire-season drought pressure with MTBS large-fire acres. The drought signal is stronger than the ignition-count signal. The correlation is about 0.28 notable but not a law.

This is the line that shouws drought does not guarantee a bad season, but it makes a bad season easier to build. It lowers the amount of bad luck required.

This colored scatter plot compares summer hydrologic drought, fire acreage, and temperature in the same view. Each point is one year. Years farther left had drier May–September hydrologic conditions, higher points burned more MTBS large-fire acres, and warmer colors show hotter summers. The pattern is not perfect, but the high-acreage years tend to sit where dryness and heat are both part of the setup.

The ENSO caveat: useful context, weak steering wheel

What do the ashes suggest for 2026?

The honest answer is cautious. Oregon does not enter 2026 with a prediction; it enters with warning lights. Low snowpack, early melt-out, drought stress, earlier curing, and above-normal fire potential all point toward a season with less room for error.

But a bad fire year still depends on sequence. Some ingredients are already in place: low snowpack, early exposure, dry fuels, and a thinner moisture buffer. The uncertain pieces are the ones that decide how far it goes: lightning load, wind events, red-flag timing, human starts, wetting rain, resource drawdown, and how many fires escape initial attack.

That is the point of the record. Starts are not acres. Drought is not destiny. Climate patterns are not commands. But when fuel exists, the fuel dries, and ignition arrives in the wrong window, acreage can separate fast from ignition count.

Responsible forecasting names its own uncertainty. The data does not give me permission to be dramatic; it gives me permission to be alert. I am reading this as a student, not as a fire-behavior analyst, and there are deeper tools and better-resourced forecasts than mine. But the pattern is still worth respecting. When the moisture buffer is thin, fuels are receptive, and ignition arrives at the wrong time, the gap between a start and a large fire can open fast.

No prophecy. Just pressure.

The record does not predict 2026. It shows what makes a season dangerous.

Starts are not acres

Ignitions matter, but escape and spread decide the footprint.

Dry is not enough

The fuel has to exist, connect, and cure enough to carry fire.

2026 has less cushion

Low snowpack and dry conditions reduce the margin for error.

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Sources and notes

Data used in this project:

Oregon Department of Forestry, ODF Fire Occurrence 2000–2025. Used for ignition points, acres, cause/source, year, county, latitude and longitude.
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity, MTBS Burned Areas Boundaries Dataset. Used for large-fire burned-area polygons and yearly acreage summaries.
U.S. Drought Monitor, Oregon drought data, summarized to yearly / spring / summer / fire-season DSCI.
NOAA climate division data for Oregon: precipitation, average temperature, Palmer Drought Severity Index, and Palmer Hydrological Drought Index.
USDA NRCS / NWCC watershed and snow-water-equivalent screenshot used as 2026 setup context.
National Interagency Coordination Center / NIFC, National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook, used for 2026 fire-potential context.
Drought.gov, Snow Drought Current Conditions and Impacts in the West, used for 2026 snow-drought and early melt-out context.

A final caution: ODF ignition data is not the same as every ignition in every jurisdiction in Oregon. That is why the map is treated as ODF’s fire occurrence record, not a complete statewide fire atlas.