Is California’s fire season over? Not quite yet, experts say
By Soumya Karlamangla
Anyone looking at data from California’s fire season this year might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief.
Only about 312,739 acres have burned in the state so far in 2023, compared with an average of 1.57 million acres by this point in the previous five years, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. Even with a large, disruptive fire at the Oregon border in the summer, 2023 still ranks as a relatively mild fire year, a welcome change from 2020 and 2021, California’s two worst wildfire seasons on record.
Summer is behind us now, but can we close the book on the 2023 fire season? Not quite yet, experts say.
California’s fire season is increasingly stretching year-round, and some exceptionally devastating fires have erupted in October, November and December in recent years.
The deadliest wildfire on record in the state, the Camp fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, broke out on Nov. 8, 2018. One of the largest in terms of burned area, the Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, began on Dec. 4, 2017.
We haven’t seen anything like that this year. The state had an exceptionally wet winter and an unusually cool spring and summer. On top of that, the unusual summer rains from Hurricane Hilary sharply reduced fire danger in Southern California.
Long-term forecasts suggest that the 2023 fire year will wind up looking much like 2022, another mild year, said Neal Driscoll, a geosciences professor at the University of California, San Diego. But he warned that there are no guarantees.
Dry, fast-moving Santa Ana or Diablo winds, especially if combined with a heat wave, could quickly parch vegetation and make any fires that break out more likely to balloon in size. Those winds are most common between September and May, and federal forecasts predict above-average temperatures for California for the next few months.
“We could put ourselves right back into a higher condition of fire threat,” Driscoll said. “I share your relief that it hasn’t been more extreme so far, but I’m also very cautious to think things couldn’t change.”
Experts have warned that the rainfall this year has spurred so much plant growth that there will be a lot of vegetation ready to burn when the conditions eventually become right for fires. Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA, told the Los Angeles Times that, given the damp conditions, it would take “a pretty big, bad-luck convergence of factors” to have a major wildfire before this year is over, but that he thought “it’s much more likely that next year is the big fire danger year.”
Even if this year remains mild, experts say that in general, warmer temperatures from climate change are expected to make wildfires in California burn bigger, hotter and faster than in the past, and that pattern still holds.
“In the midst of a long-term trend which seems decidedly in the direction of worse fires, you can have a reprieve, just because the sky delivers just the amount of moisture at the right time,” said Julien Emile-Geay, a climate scientist at the University of Southern California. “Of course, it’s very welcome when it happens. But it’s not the basis of any long-term strategy.”