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A wet April has kept fire activity at a minimum so far in the Interior.

“It has been quiet,” Robert Schmoll, fire management officer for the Division of Forestry in Fairbanks, said on Thursday. “We had one fire two weeks ago out by Salcha, and that’s it.”

Everything is still so wet it won’t burn, a problem the Alaska Fire Service has had to deal with while attempting to conduct several prescribed burns on military training ranges around Fairbanks and Delta Junction.

“We’ve had wet weather and the fuels haven’t dried out,” AFS information officer Doug Stockdale said. “That’s been part of the problem with our prescribed fires; they can’t get a burn that carries.”

With only two-tenths an inch of precipitation, April is normally the driest month of the year, according to meteorologist Rick Thoman with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks.

This April, however, ranked as one of the snowiest and wettest on record in Fairbanks. Thanks to a series of late-season snow storms, it was the third-wettest (1.27 inches of precipitation) and third-snowiest (14.7 inches) April in more than 100 years in Fairbanks.

It has also been cooler than normal this spring. The average temperature in April was about 2 degrees below normal, Thoman said. The first 60-degree day at Fairbanks International Airport was recorded on May 4 and the average date for the first 60-degree day in Fairbanks during the past 30 years is April 29, he said.

The wet, heavy snow in April “essentially acted more like rain,” Schmoll said. “It saturated everything.”

A lower-than-normal snowpack for much of the winter also allowed the frost line to go deeper than usual, Schmoll said. The ground is still thawing out, he said.

“There’s a lot of moisture in the duff layer,” he said, referring to the top layer of the forest floor. “That definitely keeps the fire danger down.”

Even with one of the wettest Aprils on record, however, fire forecasters are calling for above-normal fire potential in the central Tanana and upper Yukon valleys, according to a summer outlook for the Alaska fire season released Thursday.

“The Interior was dry going into last winter and we had a low snow pack going into April,” said Sharon Alden, a meteorologist with the agency’s predictive services division. “I don’t think we caught up even with all the April snow.”

The AFS has also received reports of smoke in the upper Yukon valley that might be the result of fires that have overwintered in the dry duff under the snow, which typically only happens in very dry years, Alden said.

Other areas of the state fire forecasters are concerned about are the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and southwestern Kenai Peninsula, she said.

Both regions have thousands of acres of spruce bark beetle-killed spruce trees, and a population boom in the Mat-Su Valley is resulting in more land clearing and brush burning, which could spark fires.

The summer fire outlook is based on fuel conditions, human activity and expected weather, but Alden conceded that predicting the weather three months in advance is a sketchy proposition, especially in Alaska, where predicting the weather three days in advance is a challenge.

“Right now, the forecast from National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is for warmer-than-normal temperatures in southwestern Alaska and on the North Slope,” she said. “Even banking on that forecast, there’s not a lot of confidence in a three-month forecast and what will happen in the fire season.”

Recent research into the number of acres burned in Alaska based on global weather patterns suggests a below-normal number of acres will burn this year in Alaska, Alden said. Mostly, though, she said the fire season will depend on what the weather is like in late May and early June.

The 2007 fire season was a slow one in Alaska. Just more than half a million acres burned during the summer, compared to the average of about 2 million acres and even that number was deceiving because half of the total burned in September in the Anaktuvuk River wildfire on the North Slope, the largest fire ever recorded on the North Slope.