Southern California Wildfires Are So Intense They’re Creating Their Own Weather

The major wildfires surrounding people living in Southern California’s Inland Empire on three sides are creating thunderclouds and fire whirls as they exhibit erratic, unpredictable behavior that has become increasingly common in the last decade.

Drought, climate change and land management practices have all helped feed such extreme fire behavior, which makes the fires more dangerous and harder to control. The fires burning in Southern California have made stunningly quick runs, threatening thousands of structures.

“It’s a pretty scary situation around the L.A. Basin right now,” said Neil Lareau, fire expert at the University of Nevada, Reno. With steep mountain canyons, lots of bone-dry vegetation and just enough wind to rile things up, “the result was just this explosion of fire yesterday [Tuesday] afternoon.”

Firefighters generally cannot directly attack a fire that is showing this kind of behavior.

“Really, not a lot can be done when these fires are ripping up a canyon,” as we’ve seen in recent days, he said.

Fires can also create their own winds, which increases spotting — when embers are lofted into the air and land to create new fires ahead of the main front.

“And then we also saw some really extreme smoke and what we call plume dynamics yesterday,” Lareau said, referring to when the fire is controlled by the energy and wind it is creating. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to safely fly aircraft to drop water or retardant.

In such conditions, he said, fire crews can’t make much progress on stopping the fire and can only focus on “trying to protect life and property to the extent possible.”

For researchers like Lareau, studying the conditions that support extreme fire behavior is crucial for one day giving responders and citizens better warnings about what to expect. Ideally, the information will also give land managers better strategies for how to treat fuels and prevent fires from getting so extreme in the first place since so little can be done to fight them.

What has been interesting about these fires, Lareau said, is that they’ve behaved more extremely than expected, given atmospheric conditions.

“We certainly had significant fire weather yesterday, but nothing off the charts,” he said. “I was a bit surprised by just how far the Bridge Fire, in particular, ran yesterday.”

The Bridge Fire exploded in size to at least 48,000 acres and burned homes around the community of Wrightwood on Tuesday night. Firefighters are still battling to save homes within Wrightwood and the nearby communities of Pinon Hills and Mount Baldy. The fire is 0% contained.

There were some winds, but nothing like the annual Santa Ana winds that affected the area in autumn.

“The winds yesterday were probably not even half as strong as we see in some of these other events, kind of at the lower end of what we expect for these really extreme fire behavior days,” Lareau said.

No one knows exactly when or how strong Santa Ana winds will be this year. But this week’s Southern California fire behavior bodes poorly for anyone hoping for a calm, swift end to fire season.