More heat, more wind for fire-prone Northern California. Relief possible this weekend
More well-above-average temperatures and windy conditions will combine to create yet another period of high wildfire risk early this week in Northern California, according to the latest forecasts.
The National Weather Service has upgraded a fire weather watch to a red flag warning, in place 11 p.m. Monday through 8 a.m. Wednesday for a stretch of the Sacramento Valley northwest of the capital, the North Bay and a portion of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The warning advises that gusts pushing in from the north could hit between 30 mph and 40 mph in some of those areas, amid low daytime and overnight humidity.
There are at least a few more days of unseasonably warm weather in store for the valley, as well. Sacramento, which normally sees highs in the mid-70s by this point in October, is forecast to stay in the high 80s Monday through Wednesday.
A cool-down, which forecasters last week had predicted would start a few days earlier, is now expected later in the week: Sacramento should drop to 81 degrees by Thursday, into the high 70s by Friday and is forecast to hit 74 by Saturday, according to the NWS.
For more than two months, Northern California has been battered by weather conditions conducive to fire growth, leading 2020 to smash the modern record for annual land area burned at well over 4 million acres.
It all started with a freak thunderstorm in mid-August that brought down thousands of lightning strikes, igniting dozens of major fire incidents and hundreds of smaller ones across the Bay Area, the Central Valley and the foothills. The biggest fire in state history, the August Complex centered around Mendocino National Forest, sparked in that storm and continues to burn without full containment. It has consumed over 1 million acres.
Since the middle of August, the combination of almost no rain and near-weekly wind events has created critical wildfire conditions, causing flare-ups on existing large wildfires and explosive starts for new ones. The Zogg Fire near Redding and the Glass Fire near Santa Rosa sparking in late September fell into the latter category, raging at their outsets and quickly necessitating mandatory evacuation orders. The Zogg Fire killed four people. The Glass Fire destroyed over 600 homes.
In a bit of good fortune, a red flag warning issued late last week that encompassed the Bay Area and most of interior Northern California came to pass with minimal new wildfire activity, even as it was extended through Saturday morning.
The bad luck: there’s still no meaningful precipitation on the immediate horizon for California, forecasts show. Fire and weather officials believe the 2020 fire season’s danger won’t subside until there is widespread and significant rainfall to douse the dry vegetation.
This story was originally published October 19, 2020 at 10:09 AM with the headline "More heat, more wind for fire-prone Northern California. Relief possible this weekend."
