![]() ![]() Friday morning it was 2,466 acres and had 311 personnel assigned. The official cause has not yet been released, but lightning is suspected said Captain Andrew Freeborn of the Kern County Fire Department. The largest has been the Thunder Fire (see map above) just west of the Grapevine on Interstate 5 north of Frazier Park. The lack of numerous huge fires in the wake of the lightning is likely due to the rain that accompanied the strikes in some areas, high relative humidity, and it being fairly early in the fire season before fuel moistures drop to critical levels. It is still possible that some of the 50,000+ lightning strikes in California on Wednesday and Thursday could have started fires that are undetected, very small, and smouldering, but so far most of the blazes that have been reported have been contained, or very close to it. PDT June 23, 2022, near the Grapevine on Interstate 5 in Southern California. Swain, Danielle Touma, and Deepti Singh.Ĩ:15 a.m. The six researchers who participated in the project were Dmitri A. We find that nearly half of all lightning strikes in N&C CA are “dry” (accompanied by <0.10 in. We assess regional-scale atmospheric conditions favorable for dry lightning in central & northern California (N&C CA), as well as seasonality. In the tweet below, click on “read reply” to see more discussion and illustrations. The paper the group produced is available as open source: “Meteorological and geographical factors associated with dry lightning in central and northern California.”ĭaniel Swain, a prolific user of Twitter, used the platform today to highlight some of the group’s findings. The six scientists used daily gridded lightning and precipitation observations (1987–2020) in combination with atmospheric reanalyses, to characterize the climatology of dry lightning and the associated meteorological conditions during the warm season (May–October) when wildfire risk is highest. And on the occasions when there are thousands of down strikes, it can overwhelm the capacity to suppress what can be hundreds of fires. Of course dry lightning is the bane of land managers and is much more likely to ignite a wildfire than a wet thunderstorm. (From the paper)Ī group of six researchers who studied the occurrence and characteristics of cloud to ground lightning in Central and Northern California found that nearly half, 46 percent, was dry, accompanied by less than 0.1 inch of precipitation. Blue dashes in (D) represent the dry lightning fraction computed from all months and elevation zones. Dashed lines in (D) indicate the dry lightning fraction averaged across all months for each zone. ![]() (D) The three elevation zones for each month (bars). ![]() Text indicates the area of each elevation zone, and inset map shows the geographic distribution of the elevation zones and major mountain ranges. (B) Total number of dry lightning flashes across three elevation zones (2000 m) within the domain for each month between 1987–2020. ![]()
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