Extreme Fire Weather Associated with Nocturnal Drying in Elevated Coastal Terrain of California

Abstract

AbstractThe second largest fire shelter deployment in U.S. history occurred in August 2003 during the Devil Fire, which was burning in a remote and rugged region of the San Francisco Bay Area, when relative humidity abruptly dropped in the middle of the night, causing rapid fire growth. Nocturnal drying events in the higher elevations along California’s central coast are a unique phenomenon that poses a great risk to wildland firefighters. Single-digit relative humidity with dewpoints below −25°C is not uncommon during summer nights in this region. To provide the fire management community with knowledge of these hazardous conditions, an event criterion was established to develop a climatology of nocturnal drying and to investigate the synoptic patterns associated with these events. A lower-tropospheric source region of dry air was found over the northeastern Pacific Ocean corresponding to an area of maximum low-level divergence and associated subsidence. This dry air forms above a marine inversion and advects inland overnight with the marine layer and immerses higher-elevation terrain with warm and dry air. An average of 15–20 nocturnal drying events per year occur in elevations greater than 700 m in the San Francisco Bay Area, and their characteristics are highly variable, making them a challenge to forecast.