Santa Ana winds return; elevated fire risk in Southern California

AccuWeather

As recovery efforts continue in Southern California, Santa Ana winds are expected to return, increasing the fire risk and prolonging containment efforts in the region this week as of Jan. 20.

Transcript

00:00Ken Clark last week I said you know we'd love to have you on here Ken but anytime we're talking

00:04about you were talking about big problems in California and it's the lack of rainfall it's

00:08the return of the damaging winds. Let's begin with the change that we had over the weekend

00:14the containment numbers coming up and then what what we are forecasting for today.

00:18Certainly it was a good weekend for the firemen and recovery efforts going on. Humidities were

00:24higher we saw very little in the way of wind of importance but things have changed are changing

00:29very rapidly in fact I'm seeing the Santa Ana's already beginning to develop across area mountains

00:35I had a wind gust a little before seven o'clock pacific time of 68 miles an hour up and through

00:41the San Gabriel mountains. These winds will increase as we go through the morning into

00:46the early afternoon come down to the surface we expect as strong of a wind event as we had two

00:51weeks ago that's the unfortunate nature very dangerous situation coming up damage is likely

00:58trees and power lines coming down there's going to be power shutoffs there's going to be travel

01:04problems as well everything we had with the last big wind event is going to happen again this time

01:11let's hope let's hope we don't have any fires break out. From a weather standpoint anything

01:16different from this particular pattern than what we were dealing with some two weeks ago?

01:21It's hard to imagine this but actually the air is going to be a little drier with this

01:26the relative humidity by late tonight tomorrow are going to drop down into the low single digits

01:31to five percent area dew points going to get down below zero in parts of the inland empire

01:37over toward Burbank area very very unusual that shows you how dry the air is. Yeah all right when

01:43we look ahead here could be more winds returning as we head into the end of the week but then also

01:49looking ahead to any kind of precipitation. Winds do die down some Tuesday night and Wednesday and

01:56fire weather remains very high during that time period winds come back up again for late Wednesday

02:01night and Thursday somewhat then we are looking at an increased chance of some rain by Saturday

02:07through Monday and this could be significant in the way of amounts showers maybe even a

02:13thunderstorm and low snow levels we can see snow levels down to three four thousand feet

02:18by the end of the weekend. So there could be a chance here for some changes in the pattern yet

02:23again as we head into the weekend and in two parts of next week we'll we'll leave you with a closer

02:29look here at the 70 forecast across Los Angeles we're talking about 80s by the time we head into

02:34Thursday. Yeah and it's going to really warm up Wednesday and Thursday widespread upper 70s to

02:41even mid 80s across the L.A. basin by Thursday. All right Ken we appreciate your expertise at

02:47your weather California expert Ken Clark thanks again for joining us and we hopefully don't have

02:52to check in with you too much but we know that this pattern there's not gonna be much change

02:56until we get significant rainfall across Southern California.

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