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  • 5 months ago
An approaching area of low pressure will bring a welcome change in conditions to the western U.S.
Transcript
00:00Well, as we talk about what's happening in the western U.S. right now, there are certainly plenty of wildfires to talk about, but I want to start out showing you the alerts because this actually shows you how we have kind of a pattern change moving and it's going to help out with the fire danger. So around parts of western Utah, we do have red flag mornings, higher fire danger, though farther to the north, we have some green alerts on here. Now into Oregon, we have flash flood watches out here into the Sun Valley area of
00:29Idaho. We have a flash flood warning that has been issued. Let's take a look at radar, give you an idea of why we are seeing these things. We have plenty of rain and lightning, though yesterday, much of today, I've been talking about the lightning and the lack of moisture coming along with it, talking about dry lightning and the concern for new wildfires to spark. We're starting to see that change. Even just looking at this area around Sun Valley, over the last three hours, we've seen more and more rainfall. We're even, it's kind of obscured by lightning, but we're seeing some reds, some yellows, some oranges show
00:59up on future radar, some downpours, of course, leading to a flash flood warning. This is actually a good sign. We don't want the flash flooding. However, we need more moisture in this area and that's exactly what we're getting. However, before this really takes hold farther down to the south, we do have an elevated fire risk to talk about. Now this time of year in general, the quote unquote normal fire risk is already pretty high. So even when we are at a moderate fire risk, a level one out of four on our scale, this is still something to take into account. You want to make sure you're taking
01:29those precautions against accidentally sparking a wildfire in these areas. We do have wind concerns farther west into kind of the desert mountain regions, higher elevations of Southern California. Fire danger there though, not quite as bad. Now, one thing to keep in mind, I was talking about dry lightning. One fire that we've been tracking really for a bit here, you're seeing some of the smoke on the right hand side of your screen. It was caused by lightning.
01:591,000 acres, then 54,000 at about 14% containment. And this started August 21st. So it's been burning for a while. We need this pattern change to really help firefighters get things under control. Fortunately, starting tomorrow, that's really what's happening. We're already starting to see the impacts, but this area of low pressure, it moves onshore tomorrow. And then we really get that influx of moisture, but we also see temperatures cool down, which means relative humidity rises and fire danger decreases.
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