Firefighters try to protect homes during the second day of the Springs Fire in Ventura County, Calif., an May 3.

WASHINGTON - Shrinking budgets mean fewer firefighters will be available this summer even as unusually dry weather has increased the risk of fire in much of the West, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned Monday.

"As a result of sequester and across-the-board cuts we will have about 500 fewer firefighters at the Forest Service than we would otherwise have," said Vilsack.

Cuts known as sequestration are forcing government agencies to reduce spending. They went into effect on March 1 after a gridlocked Congress failed to resolve fiscal fights and find an alternative to the sequestration.

The Forest Service relied on 10,500 firefighters during last year's fire season.

With 48 percent of the continental United States under moderate to exceptional drought conditions and an insect blight having weakened western forests, the risk of fire is high as summer approaches, said Vilsack, who oversees the Forest Service.

"That is a prescription for very serious conditions," he said.

Vilsack spoke with Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell in a conference call organized from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

Uncommonly dry forests in Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Washington state are full of woody fuel, officials said on the call.

California, too, is expected to be hard-hit. Nearly 850 wildfires had flared up in the state through the end of last month, far more than usual during the first four months of the year, officials say.

Vilsack and Jewell said the persistently hot, dry weather in some parts of the country was a reminder of the challenge that climate change poses.

"The twelve hottest years on record have been in the last fifteen years and that has been particularly true in the West," Jewell said.

Heavy rains have spared eastern states from serious fires so far, said Jeremy Sullens of the fire center, "but it is a different story out West where you have had severe drought conditions for quite some time now."

About 70,000 communities are situated on the fringes of wilderness across the country and so are particularly vulnerable, officials said.

More terrain was scorched by fires last year than at any time since 1960, Vilsack said, and this summer is likely to be comparable.

-- Reuters

Related story: 'Long, hot, incendiary summer': Early wildfires bode ill for California

Steven Meister / Mt. Taylor Hotshots via Reuters

Burned terrain in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico, is seen in a photo supplied by the United States Forest Service on May 30. The Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire was the largest fire ever in New Mexico, burning about 300,000 acres.

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Big changes are in store for the nation's forests as global warming increases wildfires and insect infestations, and generates more frequent floods and droughts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture warns in a new report.

The study released Tuesday is part of the National Climate Assessment and will serve as a roadmap for managing national forests across the country in coming years.

It says the area burned by wildfires is expected to at least double over the next 25 years, and insect infestations often will affect more land per year than fires.

Dave Cleaves, climate adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said climate change has become the primary driver for managing national forests, because it poses a major threat to their ability to store carbon and provide clean water and wildlife habitat.

"One of the big findings of this report is we are in the process of managing multiple risks to the forest," Cleaves said on a conference call on the report. "Climate revs up those stressors and couples them. We have to do a much better job of applying climate smartness ... to how we do forestry."

The federal government has spent about $1 billion a year in recent years combating wildfires. Last year was the warmest on record in the lower 48 states and saw 9.2 million acres burned, the third-highest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.

Insect infestations widely blamed on warming temperatures have killed tens of millions of acres of trees. 

Steve Kroschel / US Fish and Wildlife via Reuters

A wolverine is seen in a 2009 photo.

BILLINGS, Mont. -- The tenacious wolverine, a snow-loving carnivore sometimes called the "mountain devil," could soon join the list of species threatened by climate change — a dubious distinction putting it in the ranks of the polar bear and several other animals the government says will lose crucial habitat as temperatures rise.

Federal wildlife officials Friday proposed Endangered Species Act protections for the wolverine in the Lower 48 states. That's a step twice denied under the Bush administration, then delayed in 2010 when the Obama administration said other imperiled species had priority.

It likely means an end to trapping the animals for their fur outside Alaska.

But federal officials said they won't use the animal's status as a means to regulate greenhouse gases blamed in climate change. And other human activities — from snowmobiling and ski resorts to timber harvest and — would not be curtailed because they do not appear to be significant threats to wolverines, officials said.

There are an estimated 250 to 300 wolverines in the contiguous U.S., clustered in small, isolated groups primarily in the Northern Rockies of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington. Larger populations persist in Alaska and Canada.

Maxing out at 40 pounds and tough enough to stand up to grizzly bears, the animals will be no match for anticipated declines in deep mountain snows female wolverines need to establish dens and raise their young, scientists said.

In some areas, such as central Idaho, suitable habitat could disappear entirely, officials said.

Yet because those losses could take decades to unfold, federal wildlife officials said there's still time to bolster the population, including by reintroducing them to the high mountains of Colorado.

"This is a species there is still time to do something about," said Mike Thabault, ecological services director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's mountain-prairie region.

Wildlife advocates, who sued to force the government to act on the issue, said the animal's plight should be used by the Obama administration to leverage tighter restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

As with the polar bear, the government is sidestepping that thorny proposition with the wolverine, and said in Friday's proposal that listing the animal as threatened "will not regulate greenhouse gas emissions."

Thabault said the agency would be on tenuous scientific grounds if it tried to draw a link between specific emission sources and impacts on wolverines.

Advocates expressed disappointment, with Noah Greenwald from the Center for Biological Diversity saying the administration "should not be exempting greenhouse gas emissions from the Endangered Species Act."

A Washington, D.C., attorney, John Martin, who represented the energy industry during litigation over polar bears, said he expects no change in the administration's policy against using endangered wildlife to regulate emissions.

Friday's proposal also allows Colorado's wildlife agency to reintroduce an experimental population of wolverines that eventually could spill into neighboring portions of New Mexico and Wyoming.

It would shut down wolverine trapping in Montana, the only one of the Lower 48 states where the practice is still allowed an annual quota of five animals.

This year's trapping season was blocked by a state court order, but Montana officials hoped to restore trapping next year.

Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said the state will review the federal proposal and had not settled on a response.

Once found throughout the Rocky Mountains and in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, wolverines were wiped out across most of the U.S. by the 1930s due to unregulated trapping and poisoning campaigns, said Bob Inman, a wolverine researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the decades since, they have largely recovered in the Northern Rockies but not in other parts of their historical range.

While reintroducing the animals further south might seem counterintuitive, Inman said Colorado's abundance of 14,000-foot mountains would make it well suited as a refuge for the animals as warmer temperatures set in at lower elevations.

Only one wolverine currently inhabits the state, a male that wandered down several years ago from northern Wyoming's Teton Range, about 500 miles away. Inman said Colorado has enough high-mountain territory to support up to 100 more of the animals.

"That's like a 30 percent increase in their population size," he said.

Any reintroduction into Colorado would require approval from state wildlife commissioners and the Legislature, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said.

Representatives of the state's ski and agriculture industries in the past have raised concerns that bringing wolverines back could hurt their industries. Hampton said no decision has been made and it could take years to work out all the details.

Other areas where wolverines once roamed also could serve as future refuges.

Those include portions of Utah, Oregon's Cascade Range, Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, said Shawn Sartorius, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service based in Montana.

Related story: Wolverines' winter food caches at risk to warming

Alister Doyle / Reuters file

Experts increasingly recognize that ice melting in Antarctica could push up sea levels dramatically higher in coming decades.

By John Roach, NBC News

Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may push up global sea levels more than 3 feet by the end of this century, according to a scientific poll of experts that brings a degree of clarity to a murky and controversial slice of climate science. 

Such a rise in the seas would displace millions of people from low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure to combat the tides.

"The consequences are horrible," Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study published Jan. 6 in the journal Nature Climate Change, told NBC News. 

Estimating how much sea levels will rise from ice sheet melting is one of the more challenging aspects of climate science. Some evidence suggests recent accelerated melting is related to changes in ocean and atmospheric temperature, though natural variability may play an important role.

In addition, glaciers respond to external forces such as warmer temperatures in different ways, even when they are located right next to each other. As a result, there is tremendous uncertainty in the scientific community over how the melting will affect sea levels over the next century.

Bamber and colleague Willy Aspinall attempted to find clarity in the chaos using a scientific polling technique common in fields such as predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but until now not applied to climate science.

The pair sent 26 of the world's leading glaciologists a series of questions about the behavior of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. About half replied to the survey in 2010. The respondents were polled again in 2012 to assess the robustness of their answers.

Bamber said this type of approach is "a lot more than an opinion poll." The experts were handpicked to get a representative perspective of world leaders from the ice sheet modeling and observational fields. "We analyzed the results in a very systematic, rigorous, and statistically robust way," he added.

The median estimate from the experts is that the melting ice sheets will contribute 1 foot (29 centimeters) to sea level rise by the year 2100 with a 5 percent chance their contribution could exceed 2.8 feet (84 centimeters). When the effect of thermal expansion (water expands as it warms) is taken into account, the high-end estimate is more than 3 feet (1 meter).

The estimates are higher than the controversial figures in the 2007 report  from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of up to 23 inches (59 centimeters) and higher than the unpublished estimates being prepared for the next IPCC report, said Bamber, who is a review editor for that document and has seen the estimates.

The discrepancy likely reflects added weight given to recent studies that indicate glacier melt has accelerated in recent years in Antarctica and Greenland, and that the West Antarctic ice sheet could partially collapse by the end of this century.

"The numbers we are getting out of our elicitation reflect the fact that the world leaders in this field are now cognizant of the fact that the ice sheets are quite responsive and, in particular, there is a potential for them to make a really quite dramatic contribution," Bamber said.

The greatest drama would be a more than 3-foot rise in sea levels from the combined effect of melting ice and thermal expansion, which the study indicates has a 1 in 20 chance of occurring. 

How much of this drama can be attributed to human burning of fossil fuels, the study indicates, remains murky. “There is really no consensus amongst the experts we approached,” Bamber said. “That’s something that we in the scientific community need to address as a matter of urgency.”

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website.

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

Corn stalks damaged by drought are seen on a farm near Oakland City, Ind., on Aug. 15.

CHICAGO -- The U.S. Corn Belt - the world's top grain region - is seeing another dry winter after the worst summer drought in half a century, reducing prospects for a bumper summer harvest that would help ease global food prices, crop and climate experts said.

"We are still concerned about getting the leftovers out of the way from the drought of 2012. At this time we would not anticipate a national corn yield above the trend," said Iowa State University climatologist Elwynn Taylor, who has studied crop production for decades. "Rather, we would expect a fourth consecutive year of below-trend crop, not as far below as in 2012 but still not up to par."

The 2012 drought locked two-thirds of the U.S. continental land mass in severe drought last summer, cutting production of the biggest crop, corn, by 27 percent from early season estimates.

The U.S. supplies more than half of world exports of corn, which is the top livestock feed for meat and dairy animals, the main feedstock for ethanol production, and the leading ingredient in dozens of food and industrial products from vegetable oil to sweeteners, paints and plastics. As such, its price is a key for food inflation and its supply outlook is closely watched by Federal Reserve policymakers, bankers, farm suppliers and food processors.

On Thursday, the government's weekly U.S. Drought Monitor said that 42.05 percent of the continental United States remained in severe to exceptional drought, down from 42.45 percent the previous week. Parts of the Corn Belt east of the Mississippi River and parts of the central Plains received snow over the last week, providing some much-needed moisture. But the snow did not offer much drought relief, with little improvement expected over the winter, according to the report.

Taylor and other crop specialists said continued lack of snow and rain was the biggest threat in the western Corn Belt - Minnesota and South Dakota south to Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas. Those states produce about half the U.S. crop.

Taylor said in December it would take about 16 inches of precipitation by April 1 to recharge moisture in Corn Belt soils, up from the usual 12 inches that farmers look for over the winter.

Worst drought in decades hits Brazil's Northeast

The moisture is vital to spur adequate corn, soybean and spring wheat plant roots, which extend several feet down to tap into subsoil moisture. Persistent drought over more than a year in many areas meant plant roots drove down 8 or 9 feet last year in search of moisture, compared with the usual 5 feet.

"Most agricultural soils hold about 2 inches of water available to crops per foot of soil," Taylor said. "With most of the moisture gone that means it will take 16 inches of water soaking into the soil and in some places 18 to fully replenish it."

A long shot
Jim Angel, state climatologist in Illinois, said the state's conditions had improved slightly but have a long way to go before spring. Some areas of Illinois would need up to 21 inches of precipitation to catch up.

"The 2012 drought is not over yet. There are several areas of the state that are 8 to 12 inches below normal in rainfall, some places even more. You don't have to totally erase the deficits to be out of the drought but you have to come pretty close," Angel said. "In wintertime it's tough because we don't get that much precipitation. It's a long shot at this point."

Illinois saw its second hottest year on record in 2012, averaging 55.5 degrees, or 3.3 degrees above normal, and the 10th driest. The state's subsoil moisture is still rated 67 percent short to very short, according to the Illinois crop update issued this week.

Nebraska, the third largest corn producing state, has 77 percent of the state remaining in exceptional drought, according to the latest Drought Monitor.

Louisiana cemeteries sinking, washing away

"The concern is we just went through a 14-15 month stretch of incredibly dry weather in most locations in the state, excluding the southeast corner. For the vast majority of locations outside that area we were looking at 40 to 50 percent of annual precipitation that fell in 2012, and that does not include the exceptionally dry fall of 2011," said Al Dutcher, state climatologist for Nebraska.

To eliminate the soil moisture deficits over the next three months, Dutcher said central Nebraska needs 300 percent of normal precipitation while northeast and western Nebraska need 500 to 700 percent of normal precipitation this winter.

"One key issue for us since we are not getting a massive amount of moisture is to keep a protective snow layer across the northern and central Plains so we don't break dormancy as early as it did last year," Dutcher said. "Last year we were putting leaves on trees in early March, typically that doesn't happen until early April. That additional month of water use compounded the problem with the drought as we got into mid-summer."

Prayers for El Nino?
Scientists are hoping they will have a better indication by early February of the seasonal weather pattern, which depends on whether conditions turn to an El Nino or La Nina - global weather atmospheric anomalies based on the warming or cooling of an area of the southern Pacific Ocean that can dictate precipitation patterns in North America.

El Nino, a warming of Pacific waters, often leads to wetter weather in the U.S. Midwest. La Nina, a cooling of the waters, can have the opposite effect.

Climate experts say the El Nino/La Nina outlook is currently "neutral" based on data from the National Weather Service and other government forecasts.

Video: Drought conditions dry out Mississippi River

"We do not have any clear signal that's telling us whether it could be wetter or drier or near normal precipitation. That's the same for temperature," said John Eise, climate services program manager for the National Weather Service. "When you're looking out that far, going out a month or three months, it depends very strongly on whether we are in an El Nino or La Nina. Right now we are between the two."

The next El Nino-La Nina outlook from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center will be released Jan. 10.

Taylor said a return of La Nina, which the U.S. experienced in 2012, could be devastating: a return of abnormally high temperatures and diminished rains.

Video: A promising sign for California’s water supply

"We can be concerned with this dryness but we could have the same setup as 2001, 2003, 2007 that followed major drought years in western Nebraska where it turned exceptionally wet in the spring, reduced irrigation demands. We still carried a high hydrological drought, but agriculturally we were at yield trend or above trend," Dutcher said.

For the moment, however, the worries remain. Freezing temperatures hitting much of the Midwest this week will prevent any moisture from permeating the soil.

"Even if we got normal precipitation through the winter that would not necessarily take care of the drought west of the Mississippi River. It's pretty tough now," Eise said. 

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A winter storm swept into the Northeast on Thursday, bringing up to 21 inches of snow, drenching rain – and a new round of travel headaches.

By late afternoon, more than 1,000 flights had been canceled, and more than 8,000 were delayed, according to FlightStats.com, frustrating thousands of stranded passengers.

At Philadelphia International Airport, assistant principal Tomorrow Jenkins was desperate to get to Orlando, Fla., where her high school’s band was slated to perform at a Rutgers University bowl game Friday.

Her flight had been delayed and canceled, and she missed a connection. “I’m a little anxious,” she told NBCPhiladelphia.com at the airport, where dozens of flights were scrapped on Thursday.

Passengers on a Southwest Airlines jet bound for Florida from Long Island faced an unexpected wait after the Boeing 737 went off the runway and got stuck in the grass. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters said officials were investigating if wet weather was a factor in the mishap, which caused no injuries.

An American Airlines flight that landed safely in Pittsburgh on Wednesday night got stuck in snow for about two hours on the tarmac, The Associated Press reported. 

The Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, where all flights had been grounded until Wednesday afternoon after the storm passed, still had two dozen cancellations on the board.

Read more at weather.com

A passenger who had been stuck on a plane at the gate there for three hours on Christmas night recorded an American Airlines pilot apologizing for the situation.

“I've made more personal phone calls than I know what to do with,” the pilot said in an audio recording obtained by WFAA-TV.

“I've spent my last quarter, to be honest with you. It's beyond reproach. I have no words to tell you... to tell you how sorry I am. This is way above our heads... by people that obviously, in my humble opinion, don't have a clue what they're doing,” said the pilot.

The airline said in a statement that it "was obviously a very challenging day" and apologized for any inconvenience.

The weather system, which developed just before Christmas, has already spawned twisters, high winds, icy roads, and record snowfall in the nation’s midsection, where it was blamed for a dozen deaths.

On Thursday, it blanketed towns from Pennsylvania to Maine in white.

Woodford, Vt., got socked with 21 inches of snow -- the highest total of the storm so far. In Edwards, N.Y., 16 inches fell. Coudersport, Pa., saw 15 inches; Windsor, Mass., got 13.4 inches; and Lebanon, Maine, had a foot, the National Weather Service reported.

Where there wasn’t snow, there was rain. In New Jersey, flooding and high winds forced the closure of parts of Brick Township, local officials told the Weather Channel's Mike Seidel.

Thursday brought mostly rain to New York City, Philadelphia and Boston, but that could change this weekend. The Weather Channel’s Tom Niziol said a new system could dump up to four inches of snow on the major Northeast cities.

The Weather Channel's Michael Palmer and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The climate change issue has been virtually a non-issue during the presidential campaign — but it's primed to take a higher profile after the elections, in part due to Hurricane Sandy's horrific aftermath. At least that's the view of Shawn Lawrence Otto, one of the founders of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science of America."

Otto focused on climate politics during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show airing online and in the Second Life virtual world. You can hear an archived version of the hourlong program, hosted by yours truly, via the BlogTalkRadio archive or iTunes.

Hurricane Sandy already has re-energized the debate over the global effects of escalating greenhouse-gas emissions.

On one side, experts point to the fact that this season's warmer seas helped the storm keep up its strength as it moved northward, and that higher sea levels added to the strength of Sandy's storm surge. Such conditions are expected to be more common if current climate trends continue. On the other side, skeptics point out that Sandy's strength was in line with extreme storms of the past. For more on the back-and-forth over Sandy specifically, check out this posting by Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard and this one by Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin — and be sure to follow the Web links.

Otto sides with those who believe Hurricane Sandy will bring the climate debate back into the spotlight.

"I do think that, moving forward, it may be a watershed moment, so to speak," Otto told me on "Virtually Speaking Science." However, he acknowledged that the same claim could have been made for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which didn't end up moving the dial appreciably on attitudes toward climate change.

Hurricane Sandy may not make voters more amenable to cap-and-trade schemes or a carbon tax, but it's more likely to highlight the flip side of climate policy: how to adapt to potential impacts and encourage climate-conscious innovation. More people are talking about the cost vs. benefit of storm surge barriers for the New York metro area, for example. Insurers may add disincentives for coastal development, in anticipation of higher sea levels or more frequent extreme storms. The federal government may provide more support for energy technologies that cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions.

That's basically GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's strategy on the climate issue. In his response to ScienceDebate.org's questionnaire, he said he favored "robust government funding" for research into low-emission, high-efficiency industrial technologies. He maintained that this kind of "No Regrets" policy would benefit America "regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize, and regardless of whether other nations take effective action."

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has long championed the development of renewable-energy technologies as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, even if such efforts have occasionally gotten him into trouble. An example of that is the controversy over Solyndra, a solar-panel company that went bankrupt after receiving more than a half-billion dollars in government-backed loans.

Otto speculates that Obama may have a freer hand to pursue climate initiatives if he wins a second term — and that post-Sandy reconstruction may serve as a rallying point for political allies.

There's some evidence this is already coming to pass: Just today, New York City's independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cited the climate challenge and the lessons from the superstorm as reasons for endorsing Obama.

"The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast – in lost lives, lost homes and lost business – brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief," Bloomberg wrote. "Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week's devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action."

Bloomberg said Obama was taking major steps to reduce carbon emissions, while Romney abandoned "the very cap-and-trade program he once supported."

The mayor's endorsement probably won't have much impact on the vote in New York, a state that's as solidly in Obama's column as any state could be. But does it hint at a major change in the political climate?

For more food for thought, watch this archived video from a Capitol Hill debate between Obama surrogate Kevin Knobloch and Republican Mike Castle, who served two terms as Delaware governor and nine terms in Congress. The debate, titled "After Sandy: Climate Change, Science and the Next Four Years," was moderated by Otto and Climate Desk Live's Chris Mooney.

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg sees deep significance in Bloomberg's endorsement, suggesting that it "turned climate change from liability into a potentially winning political issue in this presidential election," and may embolden Republicans who secretly support action on the climate issue to "come out of the closet." Do you agree? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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• Alan Stern on the Uwingu mystery space venture
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• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
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"Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Caltech Virtual Astronomy Group. The Exploratorium's Paul Doherty will be my guest on Dec. 5 for a VSS program looking back at the year's astronomical highlights and looking ahead to 2013.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Steve Digiovanna / Madison County via AP

The 19 Mile wildfire in southwest Montana consumes a home on Wednesday.

Winds and high temperatures were expected to create critical wildfire conditions this weekend in parts of Colorado, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming and nearly all of Montana -- where three new large fires started Friday, adding to the 100 square miles that have burned there in recent days.

Crews are battling 10 uncontained fires in Montana, the worst of which is the 19 Mile wildfire. A dozen homes have been destroyed there and 125 more are threatened at that fire alone.

Campers hoping to spend Labor Day weekend in popular spots were told to stay away due to the danger.

The fires and dry summer have left much of Montana either scorched or brown.

Billings has seen its driest summer on record, the National Weather Service's Billings office reported on its Facebook page, as well as its second warmest.

It's also seen 47 days above 90 degrees, when the norm is 29 days.

So far, at least, the city's water supply has stayed healthy.

“We can be thankful that we’re a little sea of green in a very brown landscape,” Mike Rubich, a city water official, told the Billings Gazette.

Incident Management Team / inciweb.org

Land scorched by wildfires in Montana includes this patch behind the Lazy EL Ranch. The ranch was saved and that fire was fully contained on Friday.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and the neighboring Crow Indian Reservation have seen the worst of the Montana fires this summer.

The Cheyenne have lost 19 homes this summer, and seen 90 square miles of reservation burn, The Associated Press reported. The Crow have lost one home but have seen 150 square miles burn.

Related: Families on reservation devastated by fires

"Most of middle class America would be able to recover," Jennifer Perfater, tribal liaison for the American Red Cross of Montana, told The Associated Press. "But on the reservations here, you've got people who don't have homeowners insurance because they can't afford it. They've completely lost their homes."

Across the U.S., this year has seen fewer total wildfires than average, but a much larger area burned.

As of Friday, 7.6 million acres had burned since Jan. 1, well above the 5.9 million acre average for 2003-20012, the National Interagency Fire Center reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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