During the warm season local terrain and ecological disturbances over the intermountain western U.S. are often the result of cascading events that have their origins in atmospheric circulations that span thousands of kilometers in space and as long as a week or more in time. Natural and/or manmade climate forcing establishes these circulations as a downscale dissipative signal in the atmosphere. Thus climate organizes shorter period spatial and temporal weather that targets local complex terrain. Planetary wave breaking (PWB) over the complex terrain of the western U.S. PWB often organizes a cascading group of finer scale circulations and linked natural disasters. PWB occurs over scales ~2500-5000 km and 3-5 days when a disturbance in the jet stream collides with downstream blocking flow. Dry lightning often is the result of PWB during the warm season over the elevated western plateaus triggering wildland fires that produce burn scars resulting in subsequent flash flooding and debris flows days, months, or years later.