This curing is expected to take place later than usual this year because the moisture levels in the plants are above normal, so they will take longer to dry out, O’Brien said. That’s when they can become fuel for a wildfire. Some of it is still under snow, so we don’t fully know the extent of this rearrangement.”Īll that precipitation has also fueled new plant growth, or “green-up.” In lower elevations, these grasses and small shrubs and plants will cure out, or die, by the heart of the dry summer season, when temperatures are persistently hotter. “And we’re still sizing that up, still figuring out how much is happening out there. “What the snow crush and the blow-downs have done is rearrange the fuel bed to make it easier for fire to transfer from the surface to canopy fuels,” he said. Higher elevations, especially areas above 7,000 to 8,000 feet, will remain covered in snow until much later than normal, which is expected to decrease fire activity by keeping the soils moist and vegetation green, O’Brien said.īut this year’s heavy snow and wind also brought down trees and branches, which could add to the flammability of forests under the right weather conditions, said fire meteorologist Brent Wachter with Predictive Services Northern California Operations. ![]() This year’s exceptionally wet and snowy winter is expected to influence wildfires in several ways. Native wildflowers and invasive weeds are all thriving. The atmospheric rivers are gone, but the water they dumped on Southern California has prompted dormant plants to bloom for the first time in years. Science & Medicine In Southern California, everything is blooming everywhere all at once “So it’s important to remember that those wet years don’t necessarily inoculate us from wildfires.” And there’s some evidence to suggest we will see more of this weather whiplash in the future, where we have a very wet year followed by a very dry year and we see these extreme swings from one to the other,” said Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We definitely do see bad fire years getting worse. At the same time, the prohibition of Indigenous cultural burns and the effects of industrial logging and aggressive fire suppression have made much of the state’s forests more flammable. Climate change is supercharging California’s natural climate variability, making wet spells wetter and causing dry spells to run hotter and longer. “But the big wild card for this season is going to be the grass fire activity at lower elevations and whether we get the winds later on toward June and July to start pushing any fires around as these grasses start to dry out.”Īny lull in the fire season would just be temporary, experts say. “Overall, we think it’s going to be a less-active-than-normal year, led by that less active component at higher elevations,” said O’Brien, who works for the NIFC’s Predictive Services in Riverside.
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