Northern California has been largely spared by the fire gods this year. But our luck may soon run out.
Along with refilling nearly empty reservoirs, winter rains significantly raised soil moisture across the North State. That suppressed early season wildfires, but also powered thick carpets of emerald grass to cover the landscape.
A month of summer temperatures though, changes everything.
“Now, when it’s all cured out and dry and nice and brown, a lot of green grass translates into a lot of dry grass,” said Brenda Belongie with the US Forest Service’s predictive services unit.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles to our southeast, the seasonal monsoon is getting underway. The annual phenomenon delivers about half of the desert Southwest’s rainfall. Under certain atmospheric conditions some of that moisture is pulled northward, into California, sparking thunderstorms and dry lightning over the mountains.
Those conditions, Belongie said, will occur Friday afternoon, possibly into Saturday morning.
“Any lightning we get is likely to be on the dry side, and as dry as fuels are because we’ve been in a dry kiln for a couple of weeks now, particularly this week with temps well above seasonal temperatures and very low humidity, it’s made the fuels very dry and very susceptible to ignition by lightning,” she said.
She identified an arc from the Klamath mountains to Modoc County along with the Southern Cascades and Northern Sierra range as possibly being impacted.
Peak fire season in Northern California runs from mid -July into early September.
