Volume 2, Number 55 - Monday, June 17, 2024
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
EL NIÑO, LA NIÑA, WIND, WILDFIRE AND FUEL … these are topics on my mind this morning.
The first two, of course, refer to weather patterns Californians have come to know. The LA Times had an article on Friday with the headline, “El Niño makes an exit, but La Niña could bring dry conditions back to California.” You can read it HERE, but The Times doesn’t offer gift links. In a nutshell, Staff Writer Hayley Smith wrote:
There is a 65% chance that La Niña will develop between July and September and persist into the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, NOAA said. There is an 85% chance it will be in place between November and January.
Along the West Coast, and in Southern California in particular, La Niña is often associated with cooler, drier conditions. La Niña was last in place during the state’s three driest years on record — 2020 through 2022 — which saw decimating drought conditions and unprecedented water restrictions for millions of people.
On Thursday, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a similar story based on the same source information. You can read it HERE (gift link). And an excerpt:
El Niño is officially over.
The Climate Prediction Center announced Thursday that waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which are warmer-than-average during El Niño, have cooled to “neutral,” or near-normal temperatures. Sea surface temperatures are expected to continue to drop in the coming months, with a 65% chance of La Niña developing by the period from July to September and lasting through the winter.
If you want even more, The Washington Post had a similar article (gift link HERE) with this interesting tidbit:
Whether La Niña’s global cooling influence can counteract the recent spike in record-setting global heat could become clear in the coming months, scientists said.
I’m a Californian, and I’ve lived long enough to experience these swings in the weather, even before the Spanish language terms made their way into the average person’s vocabulary. I don’t need to read a climate prediction to know that we’re headed for some drier years. Whether it’s this coming winter or the next, it’s likely.
Of course, scientists tell us the climate is changing. My 70-some years of observation tell me that, too. But I don’t call it climate change, I call it wacky weather.
There are a number of articles from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (HERE), the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (HERE), and even the California Attorney General (HERE). I won’t argue with the points made in these articles, but among them was that climate change meant a loss of Sierra Nevada snowpack and water supply — and then we had a record snowpack in 2023 and a pretty good water year this last season. How do we explain that?
Scientists can call it whatever they want, but I call it wacky weather. I believe that the weather may be getting so wacky that we can’t necessarily count on things being the way we think they will be — and the wacky weather has my attention.
Wind has my attention, too, because I live in Tehachapi, California, a very windy place, and I’m really sick of the wind. We’re under a red flag fire weather warning again this morning, and I think the wind is driving me crazy. There was a brush fire a couple of miles from my house a few days ago, and if the wind had been blowing the other way, it could have taken out a neighborhood, perhaps the high school.
About 30 crow miles southwest of me, the wind-driven Post Fire kicked off Saturday afternoon. From a California Highway Patrol report I saw, it started from sparks from a chain dragging from a horse trailer. I’m not sure if that’s official. The wind was blowing. A nearby auto repair shop caught fire. The fire grew. By Sunday afternoon, CalFire had taken over unified command and the latest report I could find this morning had the fire at 14,625 acres with 8% containment.
Another wind-driven fire over the weekend, the Point Fire in Sonoma County, is closer to containment with much less acreage.
Meanwhile, firefighters in California have responded to thousands of fires and stopped forward progress, with nearly all of them in relatively short order.
What makes the difference? Why are some wildfires put out quickly, and others blow up and burn for days, weeks or months?
Many readers have first-hand experience and know the answer to that question, I’m sure. My observation is that it has to do partly with how quickly resources can be on the fire, the weather and the fuel load.
This brings me to the last item on my list of topics on my mind this morning. Fuel.
In recent weeks, I had an opportunity to visit two national forest areas with fuel reduction projects conducted over the past several years.
In one case, in the Nelder Grove of Sierra National Forest, vegetation was pulled away from monarch giant sequoia trees and huge dead trees — some from windfall — have been piled for future burning.
In another case, in the Black Mountain Grove of Sequoia National Forest, some of the million trees killed in the 2017 Pier Fire, sit in piles along roadsides until they can be removed.
These are huge piles of large logs. Fuel. Lots of it.
So, as we move into summer with drier conditions and towards the inevitable next drought, when lightning strikes somewhere, or a careless visitor drags a chain along a road or decides to make a campfire on a windy day … what if those massive burn piles are in the fire’s path?
We can hope, I suppose, that the work done around monarch giant sequoias will protect them.
But I still have to wonder, if we wanted that fuel out of the forests, why is it still there?
Wildfire, water & weather update
This morning, red flag warnings are throughout the interior of California and creeping further into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Temperatures are trending up. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
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