Dove fire tests California amid growing risk of hot fires

from Rachel BeckerCalMatters

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The fast movers Pigeon fire near the gateway town of Yosemite snapped California out of a relatively quiet fire summer that forced road closures and evacuations of hundreds of homes.

Former US Forest Service firefighter John Buckley wasn’t surprised to see the fire break out last Sunday. Driving through the Central Sierra foothills earlier that day, he recalls telling his wife that the fuels looked ready to burn.

“We go back and they’re burning in the town of Sonora,” said Buckley, now executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “The fuels are already quite ready to burn and are only going to get drier.”

Firefighters have gained the upper hand on a 226-acre blaze that Cal Fire suspects was started by a reckless 30-year-old man. But high temperatures are set – and new research adds numbers to the intuitive sequel: with heat comes fire.

It is too early in California’s wildfire year to make any conclusions or predictions. But with fires consuming millions of acres in Western United States, Canadaand Europe, California stands out with what has been a below-average summer so far.

To date, approx 4030 forest fires burned just over 208,000 acres in the state — less than the five-year average nearly 5,300 fires burning more than 300,000 acres at this point, according to Cal Fire.

Still, Cal Fire Battalion Chief David Acuña says he avoids the word “quiet.”

“There’s a superstition that when you use words like ‘quiet, slow, bored’ in the firehouse, it just means you’re about to have an incredibly busy shift,” he said.

California has benefited from fortunate weather conditions so far, despite a low snowpack and stormy Marchaccording to John Abatsoglu, a professor of climatology at UC Merced.

That’s about to change. “Now, of course,” he said, “there’s a heat wave on our doorstep.”

National Weather Service offices across the state are warning of a sharp rise in temperatures starting later this week. The Los Angeles/Oxnard office said conditions will change to “dangerously hot” by Friday.

This combination — heat waves and fire activity — is a common feature of western wildfires, Abatsoglu’s team found in a recent study published in diary Scientific progress and led by scientist Dmitri Kalashnikov.

The paper found that just under half of the area burned in the warm seasons from 2001 to 2024 occurred during or after a heat wave, particularly in forests.

Heat waves, defined as at least three consecutive days with temperatures exceeding the 90th percentile, account for 15% or less of the warm season. But climate change is nurturing an increase.

Abacoglou gave several reasons for the connection. Heat waves create chronic conditions that lead to drier, more flammable fuels. They also mean hotter nights, as previous research has found increases the intensity of the night fireclosing a critical fire suppression window. Researchers found that heat waves can also be prime conditions for lightning, which has sparked some of California’s the biggest on fire.

“And then we move on to the competitions in terms of fire activity,” Abatsoglu said.

The paper’s findings do not mean that all heat waves will lead to an increase in fire activity, he added. This still requires ignitions at the right place, at the right time.

Acuña warned the Californians against creation those sparks. That means mowing before 10 a.m. on hot days or skipping yard work during a red flag warning. It also means attaching tow chains so they don’t drag and spark on the road, and not parking hot cars on dry grass.

California sought and received federal financial aid related to the Dove Fire within hours. But a separate, months-long battle between Sacramento and Washington continues over slower-growing wildfire recovery funds — including hundreds of millions in aid related to last year’s Los Angeles wildfires that Gov. Gavin Newsom said in May FEMA was still sitting.

When it comes to predictions for the upcoming season, Acuña likes to make them as much as he likes the word “quiet.”

“It depends on what the weather throws at us,” he said. “If it brings us hot, windy, red flag warning conditions, then that could certainly be a problem. If it brings us rain, well, that brings us a whole different concern. We’re ready to respond.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.