Although firefighters are gaining more ground against the wildfires and the weather has been becoming more favorable to combat the fires, Ken Clark urges caution due to still elevated fire risks.
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00:00can not completely in the clear just yet. There still is an elevated fire risk
00:04across some parts of Southern California today. Those are now mainly in the
00:08mountains where the relative humidities today will stay very low. The good news
00:13is if you notice that flag it was blowing from a different direction than
00:17it was last week and even earlier this week. It's blowing from off the ocean
00:21already and that means we're starting to see an onshore push of winds that's
00:26going to bring in higher humidity even starting this afternoon, but very,
00:30very noticeable by late tonight, tomorrow and into the weekend. Big
00:36return of moisture. The moisture is very, very necessary to continue to
00:40help the firefighters fight. These fires that are left over across the
00:44area should be able to get a really good handle on things through the
00:48weekend and the cooling trend as well. Temperature is going to be anywhere
00:52between five and 10 degrees below normal by friday and the weekend. And
00:57we talked about this a bit yesterday, but we're gonna see some clouds even
00:59mentioned that some could see the marine layer return as we head into
01:02this pattern. I was expecting patchy low clouds and fog to be a lot of the
01:07coast tomorrow morning, widespread coastal and even some valley low clouds
01:11by the weekend. And as even on by sunday, there still could be some
01:16around. So we're looking for lots of good things for the weather coming up
01:20here and that's all good news. That is. But everyone's question probably next
01:24is, well, can this happen again? Will there be more wind returning? I know
01:29here in Accra that we were saying there is a chance that we're going to get
01:32some more Santa Ana winds early next week. You've been taking a closer look
01:35as well.
01:37I've been toiling over all the computer models here over the last 24 hours
01:41and trying to decide if there's a trend in one way or the other because we've
01:45had great disagreements in our model saying from a big Santa Ana event to
01:50very little Santa Ana event. And right now it's really kind of split among
01:55these models. So I just don't think we're in a spot say yes, it's going to
01:59happen for sure or no, it's not gonna happen for sure. We're gonna have to
02:03keep watching things and watching the trend of these models. That's always
02:07the case. You know, individual models may change over time, but the trends
02:11of these models are what is important. So as we go through the next couple of
02:15days, we ought to be able to get a better handle on these things. But
02:18right now we have to be very careful early next week, especially in the
02:21Tuesday Wednesday time period that if it's going to occur, that's when it's
02:24going to occur. And when we look ahead for any kind of precipitation, I know
02:30the newest drought monitor just came in and as no surprise, we are dealing with
02:34areas of extreme drought across southern California. Yeah, it's just
02:40this. I've never seen anything like this. I think this January could end up
02:44being the driest, uh, January ever in Los Angeles. Easily zero rain so far
02:49in January. Very little rain since last April all across southern California.
02:54Uh, the dryness of the ground is just incredible for this time of year. When
02:58we're supposed to have 56 inches of rain by now, we have less than a
03:02quarter inch of rain since the beginning of the rainfall season, which
03:06October 1st. So it's very, very dry. We don't see any important rain coming for
03:11the next 10 days, at least probably getting us through the end of the month.
03:15Yeah, accurate. They're California expert Ken Clark. We appreciate your
03:18expertise this morning and looking forward to at least a little bit of a
03:22reduced fire danger through the coming days.