Fires ring Southern California and it's only May. What's going on?

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California has seen an uptick in wildfires, from Siskiyou County to San Diego.Southern California has caught the brunt of the surge.Nearly a dozen fires have, together, consumed more than 26,000 acres of varied terrain in the region over the last week, in remote island chaparral as well as brushy foothills bordering neighborhoods.

Six people have been injured and some 45,000 more remain under evacuation orders.At least one home has burned.This level of activity may seem unusual for May, but experts say that, increasingly, that is no longer the case as climate change rolls back the start date of what’s traditionally been considered the peak fire season.There are currently five fires of 1,000 acres or more burning in Southern California, which UCLA professor and hydroclimatologist Park Williams described as abnormal for this time of year but not unprecedented according to a dataset of past fires he maintains.He pointed to a study suggesting that human-caused warming has advanced the onset of the fire season by six to 46 days across most of the state, primarily by drying out vegetation.

“So the fact that the fire season is beginning now in Southern California is pretty predictable, given that it’s been really abnormally dry and warm.”The region hasn’t seen much precipitation since December — the rest of the rainy season was mostly dry outside of some episodic showers, he said.Meanwhile, the Western U.S.

as a whole experienced record-breaking heat in January through March, rapidly melting the mountain snowpack, he added.Most of the fires burning in California right now ignited during an offshore wind event that engulfed much of the state, said Battalion Chief David Acuña of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.Although the winds weren’t as fierce as during the Santa Ana events sometimes seen in the fall, they combined with extremely dry fuels to create a d...