Southern California not out of the woods yet with wildfires

AccuWeather

Although firefighters are gaining more ground against the wildfires and the weather has been becoming more favorable to combat the fires, Ken Clark urges caution due to still elevated fire risks.

Transcript

00:00can not completely in the clear just yet. There still is an elevated fire risk

00:04across some parts of Southern California today. Those are now mainly in the

00:08mountains where the relative humidities today will stay very low. The good news

00:13is if you notice that flag it was blowing from a different direction than

00:17it was last week and even earlier this week. It's blowing from off the ocean

00:21already and that means we're starting to see an onshore push of winds that's

00:26going to bring in higher humidity even starting this afternoon, but very,

00:30very noticeable by late tonight, tomorrow and into the weekend. Big

00:36return of moisture. The moisture is very, very necessary to continue to

00:40help the firefighters fight. These fires that are left over across the

00:44area should be able to get a really good handle on things through the

00:48weekend and the cooling trend as well. Temperature is going to be anywhere

00:52between five and 10 degrees below normal by friday and the weekend. And

00:57we talked about this a bit yesterday, but we're gonna see some clouds even

00:59mentioned that some could see the marine layer return as we head into

01:02this pattern. I was expecting patchy low clouds and fog to be a lot of the

01:07coast tomorrow morning, widespread coastal and even some valley low clouds

01:11by the weekend. And as even on by sunday, there still could be some

01:16around. So we're looking for lots of good things for the weather coming up

01:20here and that's all good news. That is. But everyone's question probably next

01:24is, well, can this happen again? Will there be more wind returning? I know

01:29here in Accra that we were saying there is a chance that we're going to get

01:32some more Santa Ana winds early next week. You've been taking a closer look

01:35as well.

01:37I've been toiling over all the computer models here over the last 24 hours

01:41and trying to decide if there's a trend in one way or the other because we've

01:45had great disagreements in our model saying from a big Santa Ana event to

01:50very little Santa Ana event. And right now it's really kind of split among

01:55these models. So I just don't think we're in a spot say yes, it's going to

01:59happen for sure or no, it's not gonna happen for sure. We're gonna have to

02:03keep watching things and watching the trend of these models. That's always

02:07the case. You know, individual models may change over time, but the trends

02:11of these models are what is important. So as we go through the next couple of

02:15days, we ought to be able to get a better handle on these things. But

02:18right now we have to be very careful early next week, especially in the

02:21Tuesday Wednesday time period that if it's going to occur, that's when it's

02:24going to occur. And when we look ahead for any kind of precipitation, I know

02:30the newest drought monitor just came in and as no surprise, we are dealing with

02:34areas of extreme drought across southern California. Yeah, it's just

02:40this. I've never seen anything like this. I think this January could end up

02:44being the driest, uh, January ever in Los Angeles. Easily zero rain so far

02:49in January. Very little rain since last April all across southern California.

02:54Uh, the dryness of the ground is just incredible for this time of year. When

02:58we're supposed to have 56 inches of rain by now, we have less than a

03:02quarter inch of rain since the beginning of the rainfall season, which

03:06October 1st. So it's very, very dry. We don't see any important rain coming for

03:11the next 10 days, at least probably getting us through the end of the month.

03:15Yeah, accurate. They're California expert Ken Clark. We appreciate your

03:18expertise this morning and looking forward to at least a little bit of a

03:22reduced fire danger through the coming days.

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