Jason Kraling sank his fingers deep into the spongy soil on Mount Laguna Saturday and pulled out a fistful of dead leaves, brittle pine needles, shards of wood and rich brown soil.
“Look at how moist this is,” said Kraling, a fire battalion chief with the U.S. Forest Service. “We’ve gotten a reprieve from how dry things were last summer. It’s a good time for prescribed burns.”
But the outlook is poor at this time, given deepening drought, abundant dry fuels and hot early-season temperatures.
Lake Powell is within just a few feet of its low level ever observed since it was first filled. Early season fires have already torched over 400,000 acres in Colorado and California’s reservoirs are 50 percent lower than they should be at this time of year before summer has even officially begun.
After a 2020 fire season that shattered records and killed 33 people in California, federal wildfire experts predict another tough one for the state due to widespread and worsening drought conditions.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told reporters Thursday that they had been briefed by government wildfire experts at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, to expect another extremely active fire season complicated, for the second year, by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly half of the United States gripped by a severe drought, officials said that Americans living throughout much of the West should plan for a year of “above average wildfire potential.”
Good morning.
The weather forecast today calls for sunshine across the state, with barely a cloud on the horizon for the next week or so.
Pour yourself a nice, cool glass of water — and then think about how you’re going to start conserving it.
The lack of rain and snow during what is usually California’s wet season has shrunk the state’s water supply. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, a crucial source of water as it melts over the spring and summer, is currently at 65 percent of normal. Major reservoirs are also low.
California’s changing climate has pushed fire season to new lengths, triggering once-rare winter blackouts. State utilities cut power to more than 72,000 homes and businesses Tuesday in a preemptive effort to prevent live wires from sparking wildfires as Santa Ana winds threaten to fan flames. Blazes are breaking out nonetheless, including in Santa Cruz County, where two fires are prompting evacuations.
As COVID started to spread, farmers and large cities in Southern California were hit with another blindside last March. Fires, drought, and the planting season drove up the price of California’s water market, over 220 percent in just three months. Crops failed and pastures were lost.
Extreme weather will surely have its own chapter in the turbulent history of 2020. The human and economic toll of Covid-19 was already enormous this fall, when it became clear that 2020 was on track to break the previous record for big weather disasters, fueled in part by climate change. From the derecho that battered the Midwest with hurricane-force winds to unprecedented wildfires that scorched more than 700,000 acres in Colorado and gave California its worst fire season in history, weather and climate events like these represented only a few line items in the latest tally of the nation’s billion-dollar disasters.
The latest outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests that California’s persistent drought-like conditions could last through the winter and into spring, possibly fueling another grueling fire season in 2021.
Currently, three-quarters of California is experiencing at least moderate drought conditions.
“Keep in mind, we’re coming off the driest May-through-October period, statewide at least, across California, Arizona and New Mexico,” said Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska.
Forecasting three to four months out is a dodgy proposition for scientists, but NOAA’s modeling shows the likelihood of relatively dry weather through February.
After a summer of record heat and California’s worst fire season in history, Santa Ana winds have repeatedly buffeted the Southland during a critically dry autumn. Will this warm, dry weather pattern finally come to an end, or will it continue through the winter?
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
