California Deady Wildfire Nightmare Worsens Today/Tomorrow: "Particularly Dangerous Situation"

Yet another fiery scene from southern California.
The fires are forecast to intensify this week, and
more will likely break out under the onslaught
of additional intense, dry desert winds.

 The death toll in the California wildfires sadly but predictably spiraled upward and is now 24, as the Los Angeles area and surrounding counties brace for a new round of incredibly scary wildfires. 

Another "particularly dangerous situation" red flag fire warning has gone up for Los Angeles and Ventura counties from very early Tuesday morning through at least noon Wednesday. 

The particularly dangerous situation wording is reserved for only the most extremely dangerous weather warnings and is used pretty rarely. That wording was of course used last week in Los Angeles County, and we saw what happened. 

Here we go again.

The winds this time won't be quite as strong as they were last week, but that doesn't really matter. They'll be strong enough to either blow existing fires out of control again, or cause new ones to turn into instant firestorms. 

Says the National Weather Service office in Los Angeles: "Areas in the red flag warning..... will have a high risk for large fires with very rapid fire spread, extreme fire behavior and long range spotting."

Long range spotting means embers from the main fire land perhaps miles downwind, setting new, large conflagrations. 

The hot, dry winds off the deserts will affect Ventura County more intensely than last week. Ventura County had winds in the last go around, but they weren't as intense as they were in Los Angeles County.

Additional firefighting equipment has been deployed in the area.  Also, with somewhat calmer weather, planes dumped a lot of red fire retardant on fire-prone hillsides. They hope that fire retardant will act as barriers preventing flames from entering neighborhoods.

But there's only so much you can do when the wind if blowing 40 to 70 mph. 

Though Los Angeles and Ventura counties are most under the gun, fire weather warnings extend from near San Luis Obispo, which is almost up to the central California coast, all the way through San Diego County to the Mexican border. 

As I noted last week, these strong Santa Ana winds peak in the late fall and early winter and tend to diminish later in the season. However, these dry winds do hit occasionally in January.

The problem is the normal winter wet season has failed.  Southern California should have had at least a few inches of rain by this point in the winter. In any other year, it's too wet in mid-January to have any kind of severe fire risk no matter how strong the winds get. 

Long range forecasts continue to provide no rain to southern California, at least until the last week of this month. Meanwhile strong high pressure systems will continue to bluster southward through the Rocky Mountains, possibly for the rest of the month. 

Those high pressure systems in the Rockies are often set up the right pattern for the strong, dry easterly desert winds to blast through southern California. 

Climate change has a hand in this, of course.  California had two oddly wet winters in 2023 and 2024, which made vegetation lush. This winter, it's not raining in southern California like it's supposed to. All that dense vegetation dried out and primed the area for fires. 

That climate change is contributing to newly dramatic swings in weather from wet to dry to hot to cold, and that is causing new problems and disasters all over the world

Including creating those fire conditions that are causing so much suffering in California.