Aside from an impressive pair of flat-screen computer monitors, Don Green's plain cubicle is indistinguishable from those of his fire management colleagues. Yet Green is working with dozens of complex installations and the latest technology all day long, and the pressure's on.

That's because the most important equipment in this meteorologist's arsenal of weather prediction tools are mounted on buildings scattered throughout the territory. And for Don Green, summer is high season.

"My top priority is to help fire management know where to look for fires," says Green. It's also part of his job to factor the weather into their fire management planning and responses.

In the 1970s the federal government first installed lightning locators around the Yukon. Four years ago, Environment Canada invested in new locators across the country to support national forecasting programs. Along with weather stations, the lightning locators are mounted at airports in many communities, and they are also linked to locators in Alaska.

"Altogether we have access to data from over a dozen lightning locators around the Yukon," says Green. "The same company does the data manipulation and transmission for the Alaska locators, so we're able to use their border data as well."

"It's almost real-time reporting, so we have a pretty current picture of where strikes may be occurring."

"The number of strikes is also very important information. The rule of thumb is that there's one fire for every hundred strikes. So a day that sees a hundred strikes is a very different picture than one with 5,000 lightning strikes."

This spring, Green became the Yukon government's first full-time meteorologist. In the summer his sole focus is working with the fire management team. In the off-season, Green is developing a climatology of lightning. This valuable resource will help document how much lightning occurs in the Yukon from year to year, and where.

With the help of computer models and calculated indices, Green generates daily reports for the territory's fire management professionals. To the untrained eye, his detailed reports seem like columns of random numbers, but a significant amount of information is contained in these numerical lists.

"Our fire managers have the interpretive skills and knowledge to recognize things like the potential for ignition, or the initial spread index -- how fast a fire will spread," says Green. Depending on the conditions and risks, they might send out spotters in planes or monitor some areas more closely than others.

The locators detect the discharge of lightning in the sky. Green explains that there are two types of lightning -- cloud to cloud, and cloud to ground -- and the locators only measure the latter kind.

"Lightning is seldom seen here in the Yukon, mostly due to the topography. Thunderstorms tend to travel along ridges, and people tend to be in valleys, so it's different than the Prairies where everything is visible."

"Southern lightning data and research isn't always appropriate for the north," says Green. "There might be more storms down south, but different conditions apply here. For instance, we don't need as large a cloud to cause lightning, and our storms don't go as high."

Northern meteorologists are always looking for ways to better assess conditions and predict lightning strikes in the Yukon. One example is the Clark Index of Atmospheric Instability, a kind of formula that is specific to northern thunderstorms and lightning. First developed by meteorologist Ken Clarke and later adapted by Michael Purves, this index takes into account things like Yukon's different freezing levels.

Yukon's lightning detectors also indicate if a charge is positive or negative, information that is critical to assessing forest fire probabilities.

"There are more negative strikes in a thunderstorm, and the negative electrical charge tends to be at the bottom of a cloud," says Green. "Positively charged strikes are more powerful and more energetic, and more likely to start a fire."

But because Yukon storms aren't as high in the sky as in southern Canada, we experience a higher proportion of positive strikes -- and therefore fires -- from the upper parts of clouds. In a particularly dry year like this one, the consequences may be dramatic.

"The worst situation is if we have a long, warm, dry period of high pressure, followed by a breakdown period that is followed by lightning," says Green.

With records set in April and May for dry weather, more lightning and human-caused forest fires may result than in recent wetter summers.

To report a forest fire in the Yukon, call the 24-hour toll-free emergency reporting line: 1-888-798-FIRE.