LOS ANGELES – Californians braced for the extremes of a changing climate on Friday as a heat wave fueled deadly wildfires left the state on the brink of blackouts for a 10th straight day while a tropical storm made landfall. from cooler temperatures, but also from possible flooding.
The sudden change in conditions even scared the weather enthusiasts.
“This may be the most unusual and extreme week of weather in California in a long time — and that’s saying something. Wow,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on his Western World Weather blog.
While the rains may be welcome in the drought-stricken state and bring relief to more normal temperatures, floods and more brutal heat waves are predicted to become more regular as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.
“We’re seeing these heat waves get hotter, longer and longer, and we’re seeing more and more damage from wildfires,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Environment and Sustainability. “The potential for really intense rainfall is increasing. And that’s why we’re concerned about the flooding associated with this remnant hurricane.
California is the latest casualty in a year of sometimes deadly heat waves that began in Pakistan and India this spring and swept through parts of the northern hemisphere, including China, Europe and other parts of the United States.
Climate change has also exacerbated droughts, dried up rivers, made wildfires more intense and – conversely – led to widespread flooding worldwide as moisture evaporated from land and water is held in the atmosphere and then precipitated by intense rain.
Scientists are reluctant to link any specific weather phenomenon, such as Hurricane Kay, which has now been downgraded to a tropical storm as it heads toward California, to global warming. But they say heat waves are just the type of change that is becoming more common.
The so-called heat dome that baked California was stuck in all places because of an exceptional high-pressure area over Greenland that essentially created a meteorological traffic jam, said Paul Ullrich, a professor of regional climate modeling at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis. This prevented the high pressure system forcing hot air over California from moving forward.
A marquee in front of a former theater in Los Angeles’ Chinatown said: “Satan Called. He wants his weather back.”
Sacramento recorded a record high of 116 degrees (46.7 C) on Tuesday. Many other locations hit record highs for September and even more daily highs.
The heat that turned California crimson for more than a week is just a preview of the sights to come.
Sacramento, the state capital, has about 10 days of extreme heat a year and will double that again by mid-century. In the 1970s, the city had five, Ullrich said.
“That’s pretty much the story of much of the Central Valley and much of Southern California,” Ullrich said. “Such a spike in the number of extreme heat days. When you put them all together, you get heat waves like we’ve experienced.
For nine days until Thursday, the vast power grid, which includes power plants, solar farms and a network of transmission lines, was strained by record demand from air conditioners.
“If we’re going to build a statue of anyone in the West, it’s Willis Carrier,” Bill Patzert, a retired climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of the inventor of air conditioning. “Really large areas of Southern California would be essentially uninhabitable without air conditioning.”
Air conditioning puts the greatest strain on power supplies during a heatwave, and grid operators urged savings and warned of the risk of blackouts as consumption hit an all-time high on Tuesday, surpassing a record set in 2006.
The state may have prevented a repeat of the outage two summers ago by sending a text alert to 27 million phones for the first time, urging Californians to take action and turn off non-essential power. Enough turned down thermostats, turned off lights or unplugged to avoid power outages, though thousands of customers lost power at various times for other reasons.
The West is grappling with a 23-year mega-drought that has nearly depleted reservoirs and threatened water supplies. That, in turn, led to a sharp decline in hydropower, which California relies on when energy demand is at its peak.
“The part of the country that’s going to suffer the worst is the southwestern and western part of the United States,” Overpeck said. “This is the poster child for the global climate crisis. And this year, this summer, the Northern Hemisphere has just been an unusually hot and wildfire-ridden hemisphere.
The extreme heat helped ignite deadly wildfires at both ends of the state, as flames fed grass, brush and wood already “pre-conditioned to burn” by the drought and then pushed over the edge by the heat wave, Overpeck said.
Firefighters struggled to contain large wildfires in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada that have exploded, forced thousands to evacuate and produced smoke that could disrupt solar power and further disrupt power supplies.
Two people were killed in a fire last Friday in the community of Weed in the foothills of Mount Shasta in Northern California. Two more people died in Riverside County after fleeing the fire that threatened 18,000 homes.
What’s left of the hurricane is expected to bring heavy rain and even flash flooding to Southern California Friday night into Saturday. Patzert said high winds can make it difficult and dangerous for firefighters at first.
Heavy rains can also trigger mudslides on hillsides charred by recent fires. Although several inches of rain may fall, much of this runs off the dry landscape and does not leave a dent in the drought.
“It comes at you like a fire hose and you’re trying to fill your champagne glass,” Patzert said. “Everybody’s kind of excited, but on Saturday night a lot of people say, ‘Yeah, we could have done without it.’ .’”
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