Extreme Temperature Diary-November 9, 2018/ Topic: Deadly California Fires Burn Yet Again…More Climate Change Connections

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Thursday November 8th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing post will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials)😊.  

Deadly California Fires Burn Yet Again… More Climate Change Connections         

Explosive fires began yesterday in California where once again excessively hot and dry weather from the summer and early fall has culminated to produce conflagrations that will rival if not exceed those of 2017. As of this writing 5 people have been killed at over  240,000 acres have burned in the last two days. After this emergency is over please do what you can to help the people of California. Let’s review how the weather and climate got to today’s place on this post.

A) The Southwest just went through a record warm mid and late summer period drying out fuels… A big climate change signature:

B) The second ingredient needed for the conflagrations was dry vegetation. The dipole western ridge has kept California dry into early November. Here we see a note from Rob Elvington in association with dry fuels:

C) Weather wise, all that was needed to spread the fires were high easterly winds induced by surface pressure building over the Great Basin. Santa Ana and other strong winds funneling through mountain passes are quite common in California during the fall well before the era of climate change began in earnest prior to 1980. Here is the chart I used in yesterday’s post showing the weather set up from Thursday: 

Note the “packing” of isobars in the Sierra…a clear sign that string easterly winds would be occurring in favored areas Thursday morning.

As of today we see another climate change trend in California. Due to the warming trend most large, deadly fires have occurred since the turn of the century:

For the rest of this post I’ll be posting more info on specific fires occurring in California and information links from social media:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity.)

 

Here is some other weather and climate news: 

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The Climate Guy

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