That dark green is right over my house!!

There were definitely a fairly high number of Cascades/east slope fires in 2015, including big ones near Crater Lake and above Lake Chelan, as well as a bunch of high smoke days aloft in the cities throughout the region. There was never a great setup for driving lots of low level smoke into the I-5 corridor like with what happened in early September 2017 and 2020, but I'm not really sure why that matters since it's not a very useful metric for objectively quantifying a fire season. In the olden days, 2001 and 1994 were also very bad fire seasons regionally after extremely low snowpack years. The former of which even occurred in a very cool summer by modern standards. And spring/summer weather conditions (and lightning strikes) definitely matter in their own right, but snowpack has a statistically significant correlation and is a useful variable and metric by which seasonal fire forecasters base their predictions.

If those two split the difference, I'm in the bullseye. I'll take it!

The 6-hour precip map from 9 p.m. through 3 a.m. on the ECMWF shows the same feature but its farther north.

Impressively frozen precip for it being 38 degrees right now PXL_20260310_010924425.mp4