California’s wildfires show no signs of slowing down

tuesday santa Brought winds swept across Southern California toward the ocean, scattering embers and then spreading the flames of the growing wildfires. Overnight, residents received emergency text alerts warning of potential 100 mph gusts — a terrifying escalation that turned a precarious situation into a full-blown crisis. As the wind howled, more embers flew, sparking new fires in dry, fragile brushlands that hadn’t seen significant rainfall in more than eight months.

Los Angeles County, dominated by drought-like conditions, was a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Firefighters faced an uphill battle against winds so fierce that planes were grounded to drop water and fire retardant. Officials warned in a press release Wednesday morning that “all Los Angeles County residents are at risk.” Thousands of residents have been displaced since the evacuation order, with thousands more awaiting updates. By Wednesday evening, three major fires had consumed more than 13,000 acres with containment efforts lagging: the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades and Malibu, the Hearst Fire in Sylmar and the Eaton Fire near Pasadena showed no signs of slowing, are 0 percent contained at the time of writing, and are already the most destructive in California history. has become

The unusually dry and windy conditions made the wildfires so quickly catastrophic: “Any little spark, whether it’s from lightning or a person or a campfire, is going to grow quickly,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist and lecturer at Yale. School of the Environment and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “Once a fire starts in these conditions, it’s very, very difficult to get it under control,” added Caitlin Trudeau, senior research associate for climate science at the nonprofit news organization Climate Central.

Santa Ana wind events are not uncommon. “We see this every year around this time,” said Jason Moreland, senior meteorologist at emergency communications platform AlertMedia. “These downslope winds, which originate inland, are a dry high-pressure system coming from the northwest and a low, moist one from the south.” Because of the pressure system. “It’s like you have a hose and if you cut the water in half, you have a lot of pressure to get out.” “That’s basically what’s happening with the wind,” Trudeau explained.

However, these winds are much stronger than normal as the jet stream sinks near the Baja Peninsula in northwestern Mexico, Moreland explains. Air that normally flows at high altitudes reaches low-lying areas. “Every several decades, we get wind events of this magnitude,” he says.

Although this wind phenomenon seems extreme, Stanford professor and senior fellow Noah Diffenbaugh Woods Institute for the Environmentexplained that this could simply be due to natural weather variability—and that more research is needed to know whether it is caused by climate change.

However, although winds are not seasonal, climate change is increasing risk Late- or early-season wildfires in California. “It’s not just a particularly strong wind event, but also a particularly dry season here in early January,” Dieffenbaugh said Southern California’s wet season, which runs from October to April, followed the driest fall on record with record low rainfall. As it rains More variable due to climate changeThe overlap between the windy season and the dry season is increasing. “We’re seeing a significant amount of high, hot, dry, windy days, especially in Southern California,” Trudeau said.