Prolonged drought, an exceptionally dry winter and powerful Santa Ana winds set up a dangerous triple whammy of extreme conditions that have fueled several out-of-control wildfires in the Los Angeles area.
Flames were fanned by ferocious winds whose gusts exceeded 100 mph in some places. The parched landscape across Southern California meant that any ignition was likely to become a monster blaze.
December to February is typically the rainy season in California, but unlike the northern part of the state, which has had its share of soakings, Southern California has been abnormally dry for the past eight months. The last time Los Angeles logged more than one-tenth of an inch of rain was in early May.
That means the entire southern part of the state is in moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
A resurgence in offshore wind is expected to keep fire risk high across the region through Friday morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.
Fires are typically fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions. Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said, “Climate change is leading to more erratic and extreme precipitation patterns,” he said. “That effect on precipitation is very important, because we’re having wetter wet periods and drier dry periods, and overall, we’re seeing this very erratic timing of precipitation.”
That means a region like Southern California could be hammered by severe flooding at one point, as it was in March, and then months later descend into drought. Lurching between those extremes puts people and their communities at heightened risk, Moritz said.
“That’s the climate signal in all of this — that we’ve opened this window where we can get these big, devastating extreme events now,” he said.
