THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license.
Dry situations throughout Southern California in early January 2025 set the stage for a sequence of lethal wind-driven wildfires that burned hundreds of houses and different buildings within the Los Angeles space.
Ming Pan, a hydrologist on the College of California-San Diego’s Heart for Western Climate and Water Extremes, tracks the state’s water provides. He put Southern California’s dryness into perspective utilizing charts and maps.
How Dry Is Southern California Proper Now?
In early January, the soil moisture in a lot of Southern California was within the backside 2 % of historic data for that day within the area. That’s extraordinarily low.
Hydrologists in California watch the sky very carefully beginning in October, when California’s water yr begins.
The state will get little or no rain from Might by way of September, so late fall and winter are essential to fill reservoirs and to construct up the snowpack to offer water. California depends on the Sierra snowpack for about one-third of its freshwater provide.
Nevertheless, Southern California began out the 2024–25 water yr fairly dry. The area obtained some rain from an atmospheric river in November, however not a lot. After that, a lot of the atmospheric rivers that hit the West Coast from October into January veered northward into Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.
When the air is heat and dry, transpiration and evaporation additionally suck water out of the crops and soil. That leaves dry vegetation that may present gasoline for flying embers to unfold wildfires, because the Los Angeles space noticed in early January.
