Record heat sets the stage for an especially dangerous wildfire season in Arizona

PHOENIX — Arizona faces an above-average wildfire risk this year, according to a new report from the National Interagency Fire Center.

The center’s predictive services team can only forecast fire conditions about one to three months out — and accuracy drops the further ahead they look.

But as fire season and Arizona’s dry months draw closer, forecasters have been able to sharpen their outlook, according to John Truett, a fire management officer with the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management (DFFM).

“Now that we’re getting closer to fire season and the dry season, they can fine-tune that prediction — and that’s where we get upgraded to above average,” Truett told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News on Thursday.

Why is Arizona facing an above-average wildfire risk this year?

Part of Arizona’s heightened risk also stems from the historically hot March, which shattered multiple heat records and marked the earliest day on record that Phoenix hit triple‑digit temperatures.

“The warmer-than-usual spring that we’ve had, it just accelerated the dryness of our vegetation,” Truett said. “Even if we have an average April, May, we’re still going to be an above average prediction of wildfire season.”

It’s hard to predict what comes next.

“All we can do now is just kind of wait to see what that long-term prediction for the next two months is going to be and hopefully we get a … wetter pattern or a … cooler pattern,” Truett said.

However, state leaders aren’t waiting for wildfires to spark; they’re trying new, high-tech strategies.

This year, state leaders are stepping up efforts to prevent wildfires. Seven AI-powered cameras have been installed across Arizona to detect smoke early and alert dispatchers before fires spread.

What parts of Arizona are at an especially high risk?

As development pushes farther into forested areas, fire officials are struggling to keep pace with the growing number of communities at risk. Truett said one point of concern is the fact that the wildland‑urban interface is growing faster than the DFFM can keep up with in staffing.

“We got the urban sprawl out,” he said. “That’s really starting to to worry us.”

That expanding footprint is colliding with worsening forest conditions. Arizona is experiencing an uptick in pine tree deaths due to bark beetles, which attack drought‑stressed ponderosa pines.

“We’ve got tens of thousands of acres of basically bug-killed pine, so that is … very concerning to us. We get a lightning strike or something in there, it’s going to be catastrophic,” Truett said.

All of those dead trees create large swaths of highly flammable fuel.

“There’ll always be that fuel bed there. It’s just the arrangement of the fuel now is they’re standing with dead needles, and [that] makes it very, very volatile,” Truett said.

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