The Montana wild fire season for 2017 is pretty good. Maybe a hundred thousand acres on ablaze in the Rockies generally along the continental divide slopes. When it is quite dry and the prevailing west winds cross over from the dry regions of eastern Idaho and Washington a spark from occasionally lighting storms sets fires going that aren't extinguished sometimes until nature acts in late September. image credit John McColgan – Edited by Fir0002 - taken by John McColgan, employed as a fire behavior analyst at the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2172367
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/state/27/
New approaches to extinguishing wildfires might be required to change the pattern of fire in dry years. There are larger air tankers to drop water. Has anyone thought about using napalm from the air to start pin-point fire control lines, or coating some trees and lines with some sort of new fire retardant?
A fire-resistant spray on coating such as people may choose to put on Christmas trees might be too spendy (only people that have visited Oregon are known to use that word it is said) for thousands of acres. So maybe DARPA should invent some sort of low-cost spray-on fire-proofing for forests that could be temporary or removed generally with some sort of spray on solvent after fire dangers pass.
Would it be useful to innovate flying drones to help control fires, or ground drones able to cut trees or at least set explosive charges to blast down trees on fire control lines? Combat engineers have used a few wraps of det cord around tree trunks to sever them. The late Sen Ted Stevens plea for aerial logging with blimps even might be used to mass-skid thousands of trees to a less combustible service area.
An example of local summer weather, with about 1 and a half inches of rain per month in the summer "
Issuing Office: Great Falls
Source: National.Weather.Service
... COLD FRONT BRINGING GUSTY WINDS AND REDUCED VISIBILITY FROM SMOKE THIS AFTERNOON... A COLD FRONT HAS REACHED THE INTERSTATE 15 CORRIDOR AND WILL CONTINUE TO PUSH EAST THIS AFTERNOON. SHOWERS AND ISOLATED THUNDERSTORMS ARE LIKELY WITH THE FRONT. IN ADDITION, THE FRONT WILL CAUSE A PERIOD OF STRONG, GUSTY WINDS OF 30 TO 45 MPH. THE INCREASING WEST WIND ASSOCIATED WITH THE FRONT WILL ALSO BRING IN SMOKE FROM NEARBY FIRES IN THE AREA, CAUSING VISIBILITY TO BE REDUCED TO LESS THAN 3 MILES AT TIMES. THE WIND WILL GRADUALLY DECREASE A FEW HOURS AFTER THE FRONT PASSES."
