Climate change is weakening Santa Ana winds but won't save SoCal from devastating fires
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Set us as preferred Southern California’s specter of ruinous wildfire is back.The first Santa Ana winds of the season are expected to bring 20- to 40-mph winds, and gusts potentially exceeding 60 mph to valleys and coastal mountain ranges through Friday afternoon.
Scientists have projected that by 2100, human greenhouse gas pollution will cut back the number of days these winds blow.Now, a research team led by UCLA scientists has found it’s already happening.The Santa Anas are driven in part by temperature differences between the cool deserts in Utah and Nevada and the warm California coast.
With climate change warming the desert more than the ocean, there are fewer weak and moderate Santa Ana wind events, but this is unlikely to diminish the intensity of extreme wind-driven fires that pose a major threat to Southern California communities, according to their paper in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future.There is intense interest in the Santa Anas in Southern California.It’s these winds that turn routine fires into blazes capable of jumping past firefighters’ defenses and ripping through communities faster than residents can drive.
They keep residents up at night as they rattle windows and wail through canyons.They activate armies of volunteers along the coast to catch arsonists and address careless behavior.
They can even convince Topanga Elementary School to move classes out of the mountains to keep kids out of harm’s way.That global warming is diminishing them might sounds counterintuitive — climate change, after all, is worsening much of the world’s extreme weather.
Yet it’s true.Unfortunately, the lessening is not enough to protect us from devastating fires: Right now, it’s erasing only 1 in every 200 wind events.
By the end of the century, it will snuff out 1 of every 10 or 20, a...