With Lightning On Its Way, Is It Time To Start Worrying About Big Fires?

As soon as I heard that there could be lightning making its way up through Southern California in the coming week, my immediate thought was: ‘Oh boy. It’s time for our August megafires.’

California naturally vacillates from wet to dry every year, and between mid-August and early September, fuels across much of the state have often dried out enough to be able to carry decently sized blazes. And in some years, there’s been enough lightning, fuel load and dry conditions that things have gotten real bad.

Like in 2020, when the August Complex burned more than a million acres in Northern California, the Dome fire torched more than 40,000 acres of critical Joshua tree habitat out in the Mojave, and the Castle fire in Sequoia National Park contributed to the death of more than 10% of the largest Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada.

All that said, thanks to our wet winter, sporadic storms and moist marine air moving inland (which people were complaining about just a few months ago), much of the bigger fuel, from the coast to the mountains, has yet to reach critical levels of dryness according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Meaning, at the moment, major fires are less likely than they'd otherwise be in a lot of spots.

“Right now the risk of a large fire is very low across a lot of the Sierra,” said Eric Drewitz, meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

It’s a good reminder of just how important precipitation is to our quality of life, especially as the climate continues to change.

We’ve still yet to see abnormally dry or drought conditions return to much of the state, per the Drought Monitor, which is one indication of how sticky these moist conditions have been.

The August 8, 2023 map from the Drought Monitor shows that most of the state is doing pretty well in terms of moisture.

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National Drought Mitigation Center

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That doesn’t mean that bad fires aren’t possible. Recently, a series of dry lightning strikes ignited spot fires that resulted in evacuations in the northernmost parts of the state. And out in the desert where drier conditions have persisted, the Mojave National Preserve recently saw its largest fire on record.

But the point still stands: Any sort of wetness helps.

The good news for us here in Southern California is that the tropical weather system shaping up off the coast of Mexico is likely to bring a good amount of rain with it. So, even if fires are ignited by lightning or other causes, the predicted two or more inches of precipitation could help extinguish them. However, all that rain also means there's a risk of flash floods.

How long will this last bit of moisture stick around? It’s tough to say. But if the past is any indication, extreme heat and the drying Santa Ana winds could put us squarely in “all hands on deck" mode over the coming month or so, at least here in Southern California.