Dry season - what is the cause?! (live, cost of)

[DMenscha]

Originally Posted by MHarrington

So are you saying that these fires are here until pigs fly (in short, forever)? Also the governor said that fire season as one knew it in the past is now a thing of, well, the past. He said fire season is now here all year round.

I spent the early years of my life as a firefighter for CDF and the USFS. The fires will be contained eventually and others will start and be contained. The dry lightning storms were somewhat anomalous but not unheard of.

Arnold has a flair for the dramatic (go figure).

Fire season in N California is usually from May 1 to about Nov 15. In SoCal it runs a bit longer because the wet season starts later and ends sooner. Also in SoCal the Santa Ana winds are mostly seen in Nov Dec and Jan. These winds make controlling a fire very difficult. Mother Nature doesn't own a calendar, so these dates which are human inventions she doesn't always comply with.

[cityx]

[quote=DMenscha;4253990]
Arnold has a flair for the dramatic (go figure).


I don't know - The Terminator may have a point. I never recalled so many fires and resulting smoke before in Northern California. And it's only June! The way this map looks (courtesy of KXTV this morning) it looks like a bad fire season in September - In Southern California!

[MHarrington]

The only way to permanently remove the smoke apparently is to put out all the fires. But with more thunderstorms in the forecast, it looks like the lightning strikes that the storms bring in will only create more fires faster than they can be put out. So it looks like the smoke isn't going anywhere any time soon.

[Kingsnkali]

Dry years like this are not that uncommon for northern and central California. You look at the records dating back to the late 1840s and you will see that there really isn't a "normal" water year around here. It varies tremendously year by year. Same with the Sierra snow pack.

Back in the mid 1970s there were back to back years with only about 7 inches of rain in Sacramento. Folsom Lake pretty much dried up. This year we had nearly 15 inches of rain here. "Normal" is just under 20 inches.

We were due for a bad fire year in Northern California. And that freak/massive dry lightning event last week showed us how bad things can get. I sure hope we don't get another one this weekend as well.

And sometimes the fires just don't go away until the fall rains. That's the way it is in nature.

[cityx]

[quote=Kingsnkali;4260032]Dry years like this are not that uncommon for northern and central California.

Common or uncommon - this sucks big time. Yes, we've had droughts and bad fire seasons before but I don't believe we've experienced quite a situation like this in many years where hazardous, smokey air has filled the skies everyday for almost a week already.
Now this, I know, is not common!

[justducky2]

I've read that some researchers attribute the current dry cycle to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation; whereas "El Nino" (or El Nino-Southern Oscillation; ENSO) tends to leave California very wet, PDO has the opposite effect (hence, CA dry, Iowa swimming).

These are natural cycles of climate change, rather than Greenhouse Gas (GHG) global warming caused by human activity. Are they intertwined? That's what the controversy is all about.

Google for more details...

[web]

Summer in California is HOT and DRY

Fires happen every summer period

[cityx]

Originally Posted by web

Summer in California is HOT and DRY

Fires happen every summer period

Wow - Ya think??
Thanks for that valuable piece of insight.

[pba]

Originally Posted by cityx

Wow - Ya think??
Thanks for that valuable piece of insight.

Try saying something nice once in a while. Not everything is doom and gloom. Sometimes things are just like big, bright, shiny rainbows.

[wburg]

It should be noted that this is now officially the worst recorded fire season in California history--just something to put in the "it's not usually this bad" file...