Dry winds further spreading fires

AlArabiya English

The weather events made the wildfire spread inevitable, as the incoming winds are extremely dry, wildfire scientist and fire ecologist Dr. Chad Hanson says.   #LosAngeles #LosAngelesWildfires

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00:00And for someone like you, who's been studying forest ecosystems,

00:05who's been studying these types of fires for many years,

00:09is there and was there a sense of inevitability about all of this?

00:13Yes and no.

00:15There's an inevitability about it in terms of the weather events.

00:20The Santa Ana winds are an intrinsic meteorological phenomenon in Southern California.

00:27They typically happen in the fall or early winter.

00:30And they're very, very intense winds, extremely dry,

00:35coming off the high desert, off the Mojave Desert,

00:38over the mountains and the winds roaring down those mountain slopes

00:44at hurricane speeds toward the Pacific Ocean.

00:47In those conditions, and when the relative humidity in the air is in the single digits,

00:54if you have an ignition, you are going to have very significant fires.

00:58And so, you know, these are fundamentally weather and climate events.

01:01And climate change is certainly an influence and is exacerbating things.

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