Drought impacts on upcoming wildfire season
It is hard to believe we are in the middle of our rainy season when February has been completely dry and this week highs are in the 80s, more than 20 degrees above normal.
New drought maps out Thursday, February 10th show no improvement for California’s drought status this month, leaving our local area in the moderate category.
California is a state of immense beauty but also home to some of the most destructive wildfires in the world.
In December of 2017, the Thomas Fire started in Ventura County, eventually stretching into Santa Barbara County, destroying more than 1,000 structures, primarily homes and becoming the largest wildfire in California history at more than 280,000 acres.
Since then, the Thomas Fire has been knocked down to the 8th largest in state history as recent fires have exploded to unprecedented levels.
“We are in that drought situation. Over the last 5 to ten years we are barely getting enough moisture to keep up with the levels that we have and the fuels keep drying out and we keep getting just devastating wildfires that are impacted by the Santa Ana winds and the Sundowner winds that come through the Santa Barbara area and that really helps the fires propagate. Once we get one fire we can start handling that, but when we get a series of fires we start getting in a dry down situation with the resources we can allocate to each fire to successfully mitigate them,” said Steven Volmer, Cal Fire.
Many of the most recent fires became so-called complex fires. A complex fire is declared when there are multiple fires burning at the same time in a defined area and it would spread the available fire resources out too thin to work on each individual fire. In these situations agencies work as a team to strategically fight all of it and come up with a plan to save lives, structures, and put it out. These fires typically are caused by lightning strikes during a storm.
Wet storms this winter season have put California in a much better situation in 2022.
“If you are at a campfire and you get some kindling from the forest and it is very dry you can break it apart really easily and the fire starts really quickly. However if it just rained a bunch and you take some kindling from the forest it takes a lot longer for that fire to start,” said Climatologist Daniel McEvoy.
Before the winter season began our local counties had moved into the two highest categories of drought, but then December came and we got several inches of rain, bringing moisture to our dry hills, and improving the drought status in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties to the two lowest categories.
Despite the record breaking snowfall in the Sierra for December and the rain southern California saw in December since then we have seen very little precipitation. In order to improve our drought status we need to see several more significant storms head our way. Without more rain this rainy season we would actually have a deficit for our rainy season which would kick off fire season even earlier.
“We know in Southern California we did get some rain over the holidays but we are looking at a dry pattern again for much of January so that could set the stage if we don’t see precipitation for another long fire season. Right now there is no indication, we are in a La Nina pattern, to not expect more significant wildfires across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties as we head into the summer of 2022,” said Ryan Walbrun with the National Weather Service.
“We are still in that situation where we could still see some dramatic wildfire events, if we do not get more precipitation for the year,” said Volmer.
