People make wildfires worse, but can take steps to mitigate them As the autumn Santa Ana and Diablo winds pick up, the risks remain high. It’s likely that even more fires are in store for the rest of the year across the West. The hot weather in turn drove even more drying across the landscape, reaching aridity levels not typically seen until October.
With the drought, this effect is diminished, allowing even more heat to accumulate and pushing temperatures up to the new record highs achieved this summer. Moisture in the soil and in vegetation can also act as a cooling mechanism as it evaporates. That’s allowing these fires to burn at higher altitudes.” “The fuel moistures are still at record lows across the state of California. “That’s the unique thing, that these fires have burned over the Sierra Nevada crest,” said Clements. The Caldor Fire forced thousands of people to evacuate and burned more than 207,000 acres. However, the severity of the drought has caused even this greenery to turn yellow and gray. Ordinarily, vegetation at higher altitudes would still hang onto some moisture and act as a barrier to wildfires in places like the Sierra Nevada. With limited moisture, plants dry out and turn into kindling. But other factors this year stacked the deck in favor of massive conflagrations.Ĭalifornia and much of the western US are in the midst of a years-long drought. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said that they are still investigating the origins of most of the blazes underway. They need favorable weather, namely dry and windy conditions. There are several key ingredients needed for wildfires. Even by California standards, the current wildfires are surprising “These two big fires started in very steep canyons difficult to access, with very dry, overloaded forests that are burning intensely and so it’s very hard to get a handle on this,” said Craig Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University.Īnd as humans continue to drive up wildfire risks - from building in fire-prone regions to suppressing natural fires to changing the climate - scientists are having to rethink what’s possible. The Caldor and Dixie fires are the first wildfires on record to cross the Sierra Nevada mountain range, posing new challenges for firefighters working to contain them. Researchers said that the current fires align with what they forecast earlier this year, noting that the region was parched by a massive drought, was facing severe heat, and had plenty of trees, brush, and grass ready to burn.Įven so, the blazes have proved surprising in other ways. kS7VTDSiGL- CAL FIRE/Riverside County Fire Department August 29, 2021Īcross the United States as a whole, more than 2.7 million acres have been charred in wildfires this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. #ChaparralFire Thank you, Cy Phenice for this powerful video clip of the fire conditions yesterday.
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