Californians on Friday tried to weather the extremes of a changing climate, as a punishing heat wave that has helped fuel deadly wildfires had the state teetering on the edge of blackouts for a 10th consecutive day, while a tropical storm barreled ashore with the promise of cooler temperatures, but also possible flooding.
Firefighters had feared powerful winds that topped 161kph could expand the massive Fairview Fire burning about 121km southeast of Los Angeles, but instead crews made significant progress and pegged tomorrow as a day when they should have full containment. More than 10,000 homes and other structures remained threatened and evacuation orders were still in place.
Hurricane Kay made landfall near Mexico’s Bahia Asuncion in Baja California Sur state on Thursday, but it quickly weakened into a tropical storm by the time it reached Southern California. Still winds, were ferocious in places — speeds reached 175kph on San Diego County’s Cuyamaca Peak, the US National Weather Service said.
Photo: AFP
“This is perhaps the singularly most unusual and extreme weather week in quite some time in California — and that is saying something. Whew,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his western weather blog.
While the rains might be welcome in the drought-plagued state and would bring relief with more normal temperatures, deluges and more brutal heat waves are forecast to become regular fixtures as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.
“We’ll see these heat waves continue to get hotter and hotter, longer and longer, more wildfire-plagued,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “The odds of really intense precipitation are going up. And so that’s why we are worried about flooding associated with this remnant hurricane.”
The so-called heat dome that cooked California was stuck in place by an exceptional high pressure region over Greenland, of all places, that essentially created a meteorological traffic jam, said Paul Ullrich, a professor of regional climate modeling at the University of California, Davis.
That prevented the high-pressure system that was forcing hot air over California from moving along.
A marquee outside a former theater in LA’s Chinatown said: “Satan called. He wants his weather back.”
Temperatures hit an all-time high in Sacramento of 46.7°C on Tuesday, as many other locations hit record highs for September and even more set daily high marks.
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