Our working group draws from a diverse collection of fire experts across multiple disciplines. The project proceeds with a set of work-in-progress goals. USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies Huntington-USC Institute on California and The West “We get a decent amount of rain, or we probably get nothing at all, so fingers are crossed, but it’s been kind of a weird year.Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American LifeĬenter for Islamic Thought, Culture and PracticeĬenter for Latinx and Latin American Studies ![]() “This is one of those weather patterns where it’s kind of boom or bust,” Swain said of the rainfall. Swain said individual rain events will not erase the deeply-rooted drought, but they do help ease fire conditions in the near term. However, just because the climate crisis is accelerating, experts say there is still year-to-year variability.Īccording to the National Interagency Fire Center, the potential for large fires to spark in California will remain low for the rest of the week due to above-average vegetation moisture due in part to recent rainfall, including from Hurricane Kay. The West’s drought and extreme heat waves laid the groundwork for dozens of major wildfires in recent years. Human-caused climate change has played a role in making extreme fire events worse and more likely to happen. The upstream water used to keep Lake Powell afloat is running out “It can change very rapidly in California, and so even though we are starting to think about that as a transition time, we’re still remaining ever-vigilant, and we encourage the public to do the same as well,” Heggie said. “Just because the acreage burned has been less than in recent years, the impacts of these fires have actually still been really high.”Īnd while the acres burned are lower than the last five years, Heggie said fire conditions in California can change quickly as the seasons transition. “When people talk about this, they’re often talking about the acreage burned and actually not only does it not tell the whole story, but it arguably doesn’t tell most of what’s important about why we care about wildfires in a societal context,” Swain told CNN. This year’s fires have killed nine people and destroyed more than 800 structures, according to Cal Fire. “While climate change has its fingerprints all over these larger fires, it’s day-to-day weather that drives fire behavior,” he said.ĭaniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, noted although less acreage has burned so far this year, individual wildfires have been quite deadly and destructive. California saw one of its worst September heat waves on record earlier this month, which stoked the state’s current active fires, including the Mosquito Fire which has burned more than 76,000 acres and has become the largest in the state so far this year, according to CalFire. Spring brought favorable weather with cooler temperatures and some precipitation, but summer brought hotter and drier weather. Drought conditions are present in 99% of the state, according to the US Drought Monitor conditions scientists say are part of the reason California has seen an uptick in fire activity in recent years.Ĭlements pointed to three things contributing to this year’s below-average fire activity: luck, firefighting strategies and day-to-day weather. Yet California remains in a multiyear megadrought which has drained water supplies and primed the vegetation for landscape-altering wildfires. Heggie called this year’s burned acreage a “dramatic” drop from previous years. In 2021, more than 2.5 million acres had burned through August, while 4.3 million acres had burned in 2020. “If we get those big offshore wind events in Southern California like the Santa Anas, the Diablo winds in Northern California, those could lead to bigger fires,” he said.Īccording to Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jon Heggie, wildfires have burned around 365,000 acres so far this year in California, which is well below the year-to-date acreage burned in recent years. Hot and dry offshore winds, often referred to as the Diablo or Santa Ana winds, can trigger an enormous wildfire threat, and the wind phenomena do not tend to start until the fall and winter. “But we’re not out of the woods yet,” Clements told CNN. Days later, another blaze threatened the town where she found shelter ![]() The Mosquito Fire forced her out of her home. Structures burn in the Mosquito Fire burns in Foresthill, California, U.S., September 13, 2022.
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