"You own the entire Cali government."
I should be so lucky.
Speaking of luck, it looks like we have another round of dry lightening, this time from Hurricane Genevieve, coming thru on Sun.
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Over the past 10 days, a record-breaking heatwave has affected virtually all of California, and a wide swath of the American West. Countless daily record maximum and overnight record minimum temperatures were set across the state on many consecutive days. In fact, Death Valley reached 130 degrees during this event–the hottest reliably measured temperature in world history. In addition to extreme temperatures, this heatwave was characterized by highly anomalous humidity levels–this was certainly not, as is often said in California “a dry heat.” For the first time in 19 years, rolling blackouts occurred throughout the state due to extreme strain on the power grid.
It was “Fogust” no more.
Then, mid-way through this extreme heat event, remnant moisture and instability from former Tropical Storm Elida combined was a robust easterly wave over California to generate one of the most intense summer thunderstorm events of the past 20 years across the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the coastal portion of the Bay Area experienced intense–and even locally violent wind gusts during this thunderstorm event. Many places saw 40-50 mph gusts, but there were a few places that logged winds of 65-75 mph as these powerful storms moved ashore. Much of the SF Bay Area was under a multi-hour Severe Thunderstorm Warning by the NWS for the first time I can remember. Multiple places also experienced Midwest-style convective “heat bursts”–in which rapid collapse of thunderstorm updrafts caused air parcels aloft to plunge to the surface and warm to extreme levels. ( Travis Air Force Base, for example, dramatically rose from 80F to 100F just before sunrise amid lightning and strong winds.)
And there there came the lightning. Over 11,000 strikes were recorded over northern California over a 36 hour period, and many of these occurred pretty close to the coast (though some did extend inland over the Sacramento Valley and its foothills). As feared, unusually dry vegetation following an extremely dry winter and in the midst of a record heatwave acted as tinder–and many of these lightning strikes ignited wildfires. Over 350 lightning fires were reported over NorCal this week. But the number of fires is actually not the most problematic aspect of this event–it’s the astonishing speed with which these fires grew and their relative proximity to many heavily populated areas....
wo individual fire complexes–the LNU and SCU Lightning Complexes–will each have burned around a quarter million acres by tonight or tomorrow (both are currently above well above 200,000 acres). Most of the fires within each complex have already merged together, or will shortly. Both of these fires complexes are *already* among the top 10 largest California fires on record, are still spreading, and have little containment. I’ve heard from fire folks that the SCU Complex could eventually become the largest fire on record in California–an incredible statistic, since the previous record was set in 2018 (and, before that, all the way back in 2017).
weatherwest.com |
