The massive wildfires in the west continue to reach historic levels and while the battle goes on, firefighters should get some help from nature soon. If you follow some of the national weather, you already know how hot this summer has been across the west with temperatures topping 100 degrees for several days. Fire has burned an area twice the size of San Francisco and it's still going.
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| Satellite image from Sep. 13 showing the fires through the cloud layers |
The pattern is about to shift and already, humidity values are going up. There should be an onshore flow (winds coming off the ocean) in the coming days which will help. Rain chances will also be going up, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like big rains (or widespread).
Our forecast model does show some rain developing over the northern areas of California by Wednesday. It doesn't look like rain will get much farther south than San Francisco. One forecast model (through Saturday morning) has rainfall amounts under .50".
El Nino is expected to influence the weather this winter across California. And while it will likely help ease the drought, it's probably not going to erase it completely. As we've experienced here in Kansas, easing or erasing drought takes an enormous amount of time to replenish sub-soil moisture and recharge lakes and streams. As bad as the conditions have been in the west, it will take more than just a few wet storms to fix the problem. We are likely to have a very strong El Nino moving into the winter months, which typically translates to a stormy pattern around Kansas too. We still don't know if that means more rain, ice, or snow just yet.
1 comment:
My nephew, Adam Booth is a forest fire fighter. He lives in north California. He fights fires every fire session. This year is really bad. His mother, my sister lives in the mountains in northern California. Some of the fires have been near her. She had the car packed and ready to go. The fire was as close as mile from get. She used to be a fire fighter as well.
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