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Dangerous California Winds: Gale Warnings & Red Flag Fire Danger This WeekendAdded:
It's a Saturday. It's May 16th. A little behind schedule this morning, but we've got a red flag warning in the Central Valley. So, we talked about the possibility for fire due to wind. We'll look at fires today. We've got the rare storm warning off the coast out by the Fereralon Islands off the central California. Storm warning, that means winds up to 60 m an hour, perhaps even higher. There's a gale warning nearshore. There are small craft advisories. Um, and it's it's just a real windy weekend. So today, Saturday, tomorrow, Sunday, lots going on outside.
Wind has an impact. And of course, fire, the thing that we I'm always concerned about. Uh the fuel moisturers are not that low. However, these winds are that strong. This is watchduty.org and one of the best sites, but you basically see the west, especially down around northern Texas and and New Mexico. It's on fire, man. And these are red flag warnings in these areas. We've got a red flag warning in the entire central valley south down towards Victorville for wind gusts 40 50 60 miles an hour. We'll look at that as well. We'll also look at right now the current fire situation. There's nothing that isn't basically being jumped on. There's a few of these fires that have started in the last 24 hours that are being put out, but there's nothing at least as of now that's active. We'll check back maybe later in the broadcast actually because it's not going to take much today to get a fire.
When you get wind like this, this is San Francisco's Ocean Beach. There is a storm warning going to be offshore over the next 24 to 36 hours. That has a huge impact on tanker ships, right? Has a huge impact on recreational um commercial fishermen, everybody. So, just be careful. And at the coast, I you got these waves coming in. You see how close together they are? The swell is being pushed by the wind, north, north, east, north, northnorthwest wind. And it takes the swell and pushes it together.
creates more uh increased turbulence, creates more rip tides. The water is cold, too. You know what else guys? Out yesterday, last couple days, I was surfing and the water temperature has dropped significantly, especially in San Francisco because that wind blows the surface water away. The upwelling.
Upwelling. If you live in California, you should understand upwelling, especially Northern California and central California, which is upwelling is why we have such awesome sea life here, such awesome fishing, um, and just landscape. The the cold water has a huge impact on shore, on birds, everything.
So, it's windy. Gale warning offshore as well. What does that gale warning do to the fog? Well, it tears it up. We've seen that before. And you can see the it just everything's fractured out in the Pacific, right? You can see the the clouds are just fractured. I mean, there's Cape Menescino. Now, down around Southern California, you don't have as much wind, but you got enough that that inversion has been broken up. Um, and this low is, you know, the low is close enough to the area that the high pressure not dominating, but the high pressure is trying to dominate. And as it builds in, it's shooting these northnorthwest or northnorwest winds down the coast. It's going to be strongest today and then again tomorrow.
These are the wind gusts. This is sustained wind period like the these are the areas tomorrow or today, pardon me, that are going to have the most wind impacts. So look at this gusting to 50 miles an hour today offshore. San Jose area, east San Jose. Let's see if I can get that to load up here.
San Jose area or let's go up to Sacramento up towards Sutter Beach. So that's 42 miles an hour. So look at the contours and you can see where the wind today is. Certainly up in the central valley, certainly up around Eureka, 44 miles an hour, but also down around Barstow, Bakersfield, King City, you got winds at King City, 39 miles an hour today and into Indo and in the Palm Desert area along the coastline in Los Angeles, Southern California, not as windy. And that'll you'll see what that what that means in terms of their air quality and cloud cover in just a minute. These are the forecast wind gusts or sustained wind impacts for tomorrow. So it looks as though today looks to be a little bit gustier, but you're still Eureka tomorrow. You're still going 44 mph winds in those areas.
These are wind impacts and indicating that it's not just downtown Eureka getting 44 miles an hour. It's this region. This region reading gets a little break tomorrow, but Sacramento little more further south towards the central valley 43 miles an hour.
Bakersfield not quite as strong today or tomorrow 28 miles an hour. Strongest winds are going to be tonight. There's that red flag warning and you can see it extends from reading all the way south. That green area represents a coastal flood advisory.
That is a uh a deal where you got the high tide. It's early morning high tides. It's about a foot above that weird purple that we don't see very often. This bad boy that that's a storm warning. We don't see those. We you know when we see storm warnings in the middle of winter in a really strong um um vorticity zone like an area where there's a lot of turbulence, you know, in a winter type jetream. I've seen storm warnings this time of year, but I don't think it's the norm. You can correct me, Jan, if you're watching right now, but I don't think that's I don't think that's the norm at all. You got wind advisories along the coast.
Again, red flag warnings in the central valley. So, that's the weather headline out of San Francisco. This a weather headline out of um Sacramento. The last one was San Francisco. And you can see they got wind gusts up to 60 or 50 miles an hour in the valley. And again, this is the thing where in the central valley, you know, you got I saw this yesterday. You got the you got 505 599 all these north south running uh interstates and highways. Cars, man. Car you you watch all you got to do. This is a weather service out of um out of uh Los Angeles saying wind warnings, wind advisories, law poke wind advisories, wind warning in Santa Barbara. Um, all you got to do is whenever there's a fire, go to your map or go to watchd duty and track it down on the on the satellite and you will see that God, it has been my experience that like 90% of all fires start on the roadside.
I think it's probably even higher than that. You can tell by the way it's like it's like in like if it's 101 going through Vakavl and there's a fire and it runs up the hill. Well, you can trace it all the way back down the hill cuz fire runs uphill typically or wind direction follow that. But you can see the flash point is usually a highway. So be careful if you see something on the highway, somebody sparking a chain behind a trailer or something, which is happens a lot more than you'd like to think. This is the kind of day you want to pay attention to. We will see fires today for sure. They'll probably stomp them out, but I'm just saying there's no way you don't get a fire. Any kind of little spark off a roadway is going to ignite and move.
Sorry about this. I got this new mug.
It's sick. It's my m It's my I bought it for Pam. It's a Next mug and it's got a heater on it, right? So, it's got like a little thing underneath. It's a little hot, little tepid, but it's uh Yeah, it's kind of nice. I almost put it in the microwave and realized, oh, bad idea. I know. Don't Don't even ask.
Okay, so um this is the uh s uh forecast model GFS. There's the low pressure that makes for the high. This is through the weekend. See that just the pressure gradient. There's a pressure. There's a difference between this high and this low. This ridge and this trough. So the highs building in creating the wind because the close proximity to the low.
Not that hard to understand. And this pattern is going to continue. Not as windy, but spring these things are going to continue to tweak to the north. So we'll push in a little closer. These are the wind uh max wind speeds forecast for today.
off point rays 62 miles an hour. So the numbers read well, right? So 35 miles an hour up towards Reading, 26 miles an hour down towards Fresno, 30 miles an hour uh down towards Victorville, 28 miles hour just north of Monterey Bay. So pretty windy. But again, the spots that we're worried or not worried, but that we're thinking about Oops, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do this is is this valley that corridor right face it goes north south which way is the wind direction the wind direction is this way so it gets funneled into the central valley and really you know you get a venturi component to it and the winds get funneling so you drop a spark from a a chain on an automobile or something you're going to have problems this is tomorrow looks like the winds pick up a little bit this is tomorrow morning I think this is tomorrow morning let me look this is a forecast model again this is the GFS or no um North America and this is tomorrow morning. So late tonight, early tomorrow morning are going to be the strongest winds and you can see 61 mph winds off of Point Ray.
61 miles an hour. That's where you get a storm warning. And then again, you can see what I'm see you can even see the funneling. Right. Right. So there you go. And then you see a little less wind in Southern California tomorrow. So the max wind is between now and again tomorrow morning and then should start to die down. I know you don't need this, but let's do it.
Wind blows from high to low. We know that the farther the high is away from the low, oops, I want to do this. See, there's the high. The farther away from the low it is, the less pressure gradient. The closer it is to the low, you get stronger pressure gradient. And these are isobars. Those are isobars, right? So, this is further apart. This is closer together. And you get a tighten pressure gradient. So, I know you're like, "Oh, Bill, stop." But this is exactly what's happening right now.
We've got this high-pressure offshore building in. Let's look at it again. Do you want to look at it? No, you don't.
Do I want to look at it? No. No. Let's not. That's the ridge, right? So, the ridge of high pressure and there's the low pressure. So, this ridge is building in at the upper atmosphere, but it's also working its way to the surface.
High pressure blows generally clockwise and out. So, let's do this. clockwise and out away from the center. Low pressure centers counterclockwise and in, right? So, what's that do? Well, counterclockwise is this way. Clockwise and out is this way. And you get a wind going this way. And these are the that high is building in rapidly. So, you get a tight pressure gradient. This, my friend, is a loose pressure gradient.
That's pretty typical for the early spring, late winter. This is more typical for this time of year. The the kind of the wrapped up contours. Okay, that was not my best work, but I tried.
I think it might help a little. You get banged over the head enough with this stuff, you start to go, okay, like for instance, now we're looking at 500 millibars um euro model. I think we're at 500. Yeah, we're at 500.
It's almost too hot. Ah, look at Can you see the steam coming off that bad boy?
It's awesome. New or something like that. Ne next mug.
Kind of scary, too. It's like I got a fire right here on my desk. Okay, so here's the upper the upper atmosphere.
Here's the ridge. Here's the trough.
Here's the high pressure. Here's the low pressure. Here's the pressure gradient, right? Okay. So, you can see the wind's blowing counterclockwise around the low, clockwise around the high, up in the upper air. Now, we come down to the surface. And you go, "Well, Bill, why?" Well, the wind generally, yeah, the jet streams following the contours.
That is absolutely what it does because it's going from high to low. But because it's in the upper atmosphere, there's less friction and so they flow parallel to the isobars. When there's friction force down close to the ocean or down close to the topography down at this is sea level, the winds blow. They turn more like that. The friction, they don't blow across isobars as much. They blow kind of like this. And that's the same thing with that low pressure center. So there's the there's the pressure gradient. Boom. Boom. That's pretty tight pressure gradient, right?
Yeah. So that's what's happening right now. It's awesome.
I hope that helped. And then you see I did this. This is the pressure gradient right now. And you can see it kind of wrapped up the lot the lines dash lines or thicknesses. We'll we'll dive into that again another day. It's pretty warm despite all the wind.
But here we go. Pressure gradient dies down on Monday. Still pretty strong offshore though, isn't it? Yeah, that's a springtime. It's not as windy. They're a little bit further apart. See, see how close together they are here. And then see on Monday, they're a little further apart. Not as windy. So now I don't think we'll see wind advisories.
probably small craft advisories less less less less less. But then we get into I'm going to show you this down the road. This is next weekend. Not right there. This is the models have been kind of happy or been really selling this solution. But the idea that something around the 24th is going to click in.
That's the end of next weekend. Right. I know. But I wanted you to see the pressure gradient. So then this is how the west coast looks. Rainfall accumulation. How are we going to do?
There's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Okay.
And then here we go. This is next weekend after next early next week.
Yeah. Well, wouldn't that be interesting? So, that's what the model is. That's the 27th.
Hope you don't have a wedding or anything because you'll be sweating it.
When I worked when I worked in the TV station all those years this time of year because it's just the land of weddings, right? that this is just what people are doing right now, outdoor parties, events, and things to you put a forecast out like that there just because there's something about it.
Is sort of sucked to have it rain on your wedding. I think it's kind of cool, but uh I wouldn't if it was my wedding, I guess.
Yeah. Oh, look where you can see the north wind, can't you? We're looking The winds are blowing to the north or to the south from north to south.
It's kind of fun, huh? I like it when you can see the weather then you can see the clouds too. Look at the alto cumulus all everything's just ripped apart man because the wind even at the upper atmosphere are are flying. This is the same thing. Crescent city love to be foggy right now. It should be foggy right now. The sea surface temperatures are cool. Everything's right for foggy but the winds are blowing across the blowing and messing up the inversion. So there's Eureka. Let's see what the Let's get a close by wind. 40 mph. These are sustained winds.
46 mph sustained wind off Petroia 49 mph sustained wind. Wow, that's pretty aggressive. So this north coast, but you see remember Mount Shasta not as windy, right? Hu area 6 miles an hour.
So Oh, what's that? That's the funnel.
That's the the um area I was talking about, right? The winds are blowing north and they get and winds like to channel. Like if you're a little kid and you're playing in a stream, you ever do that in the in the or even playing at the beach and building ma moes and castles when the water starts to go out, it wants to find a easy way to go. This is what the gest the the the the wind has trouble in the mountains because of the surface friction. So you get turbulence and rotors and shear and what have you. This you get this sort of clean flow and that's why the winds get jamming. Let's see what Chico's doing right now.
Yeah, 38 miles an hour. Um, that's pretty gross. It's off the ground a few.
It's about 135 feet up. Um, because it's cleaner, right? But it's still shows you the winds. There's Fort Jones. Somebody made fun of me the other day. I was at a party. Some kid from Chico played football. Good dude. Um, surfs, too, which is weird. I met a guy from Chico who surfs. That's weird. And he does. He actually really surfs. Um, we were talking about high school football. I was way older than him, but I played ball with his coach, which is weird. Um, Ron Souza, who is a great athlete up in up in Chico, but uh, who just got voted into the Hall of Fame with Aaron Rogers from Pleasant Valley.
So, congratulations, Ron. That's a big one. And Aaron, you got you got a lot of accolades. But, um, he was going, "Dude, he's on the Fort Jones." I I go, "Why?"
He goes, "I don't know." Not that he doesn't like it, just like I think I think he was making fun of me. Okay, this is Mount Shasta right there. There.
Can you see that? That's Goose Lake to the right.
God, isn't that pretty? I know. Windy. I I don't mind wind when I'm inside. This is uh B Creek Canyon. I think we're going to look at the wind up around the B County area. Yeah, there's Chico. So, we did kind of see the funneling. And then if we go just up into my hometown, there's Orville Lake, right? So, Paradise right here. Doesn't get that windy up there really. Um and I'll show you something interesting. I think this will work. But you remember the fire in paradise? I was just showing somebody the video of that the other day. We'll look at that sometime. I was up there um that day and my we lost property. You know, my family's, you know, the 70-year homestead and whatever, whatever. But the canyon, see how the canyons all kind of run this way? Can you see that kind of or look at the creeks? See the creeks? See this? The water flows, water drainage. That's that's the way the the orientation is. The wind right now is a north wind. There's a red flag warning in the valley. Is paradise safe? Yes.
Yes. Because what? Where there's no funneling. The winds the night of the campfire came from an unusual direction.
And I my dad was there and he goes he's 100 years old almost and he said uh yeah I've never felt the wind come from that direction but the wind came from this direction which mimics the watersheds which gives you funneling. Right. So it's really somebody was out. We were talking about fire the other day and uh this is Sites Reservoir and I we were talking about how the the funneling is everything and how nowhere is really safe. Nowhere's safe. Like I don't mean to be scary. It's just the fact it's California. Well, dude, look at look at uh look at New Mexico, man.
Right. Look at these guys. That's red flag warnings. Florida, right? Let's go Florida. Nobody's safe anymore. I mean, Florida had a lot of they got a good handle on them, but the the these it's really in California almost no, I shouldn't say more so, but a lot more a lot so if that's a word. A lot so because of the wild oat. You see that gray on the hillsides? That's wild oat, which came over. We didn't have wild oat. There's uh Mount Diablo in the distance. Wild oat. I've told this story many times, but you got to understand it. There's Mount Diablo and this is the delta and this is the wind flowing through the delta right now. Um the wild oat that tall grass that lights like paper that wasn't here. It was bunch grasses, native grasses. They didn't burn because right that doesn't make sense to something to show up that's going to burn every year. So it evolved in California to have these native bunch grasses that were not didn't help firefight fire fires proliferate too much. The Spanish came over, the concistadors on the hooves of their horses was this wild oat from Europe.
Came over, boom, fast forward thousand years, whatever. And you got this this landscape that is you can't there's nothing you can do about it, man. I mean, you can you can defensible space, that type of thing. But in terms of there's all you look at San Francisco, I think it burned five times before the earthquake. The whole city burned five.
I mean, I know they built out of weird stuff, but it just goes to show you. And when you read old history books, this is I'm going to show you where the winds are doing right now. Uh, G Fairfield, we were right here. So, about 13 miles an hour. Not bad in that zone. Um, if you read old textbooks about the This is air quality Bay Area. um about California.
One of the things that strikes me is you always even Brewer talks about it up and down California smoke all these wildfires burning. Think about it. And the the Native Americans used to burn grasses and weeds as a farming way. I mean so and who was putting them out? Nobody. So there was a lot of fire and it was not unusual to have like I think at Brewer was Whitney or Brewer was talking about they were just saying yeah I couldn't see you know it's woke up again it was smoky again today and blah blah blah and you know and it's like fall so it's not it's a very it's a fire landscape. These are the uh current air quality reports which are awesome. This is Bakersfield. This is the current windsp speed down in Bakersfield which isn't too bad. Um I'll plug it in. I'll take a high winds. I'll go right to the yellow zone. So, oops. I want to do that. I want to do this. And 28 mph sustained off Santa Maria off the coast. 32 miles an hour. Off Lucia, 39 miles an hour. Air quality in this area, not too bad. See if we can get it up. There we go. So to speak. And then LA's got a weird thing. See, it's down there in the air quality zone. It's kind of yellow. So this is Santa Barbara, which looks good. Santa Barbara today will go, you know, everybody's kind of where they were yesterday. Santa Barbara go 62. This is Mount Wilson. I love this shot. Kind of a new favorite of mine.
Shows the inversion, right? So, there is a bit of an inversion, but mount this mountain is almost 5,500 feet high. So, it's I'd call that almost more low cloud that and that's being impacted.
It's not being impacted yet by the wind.
And I'll show you why. Look at the fog building in there. See how it's coming up? So, it's thickening up a little bit.
I think a lot of that is piling up. It's being like kind of a gravity wave thing.
It's being forced up. Um but and then let's go down there and see. Oh, here's the wind. That's what I want to talk about. So, you can see there's the wind right there just howling. That's 50 mph winds offshore, much less inshore because you're right. You're at it's blowing right it's being blocked by point conception the wind. But then you get a thing down here where you're not getting a lot of wind, right? So, watch what happens to the air quality. And this I thought was interesting. This is a footprint I've never se I probably would have seen, but notice the air is so light in here. There's a little bit more of a seab breeze down here because of the eddy perhaps, but here there's almost a clear line. Now, you can chime in on this, Dan, and if you're watching, I have a bunch of guy friends who are like awesome meteorologists. So, they'll they'll text me and go, "Dude, what were you thinking? That wasn't right." Um, but if I throw it out sometimes, somebody will bite. Uh this is but this looks to me like really light wind morning commute and then you can see the green here that would represent better air quality which is further south towards San Jose. So just sort of impacts further away from the low and then San Diego.
Yeah. All right.
Today's temperatures look at that. Look how hot that thing's sick.
I'm slipping it because it's so damn hot. There's got to be a way to turn it down. Damn. Says piping. I got warm, hot, or piping. And it says piping. Can you see the light? That's pretty hot. So So you kind of got a sip when it's when it's that hot. Hope you're having a good day. Thanks for coming for the ride.
These are highs today. That looks right.
And then watch happens tomorrow. Oops.
This is what happens today. Sorry. This is what happens tomorrow. A little warmer or the same forecast national. There's the low. There's the high. Can you see the low on the West Coast? I know you sometimes when you're learning something, you think you think, "Oh, it's got to look like" No, it doesn't have to look like a low. It's just this teeny little thing here. It's just that little teeny front. That's the low right there. And then this is the high. It's not It's never as clean as I'm drawing in. It's always a little scrubby, right? Something like that.
Little scrubby. And then I This is of concern to me is how much wind and fire danger. That purple, that red all the way out to Minnesota is um red flag warnings, wind warnings, wind advisories, dust, blowing dust down in Southern California down by Palm Desert. Looks like you got snow advisory in the mountains for that next system coming in. Let's see.
Portland office. Yeah, Cascade Mountain snow 4 to 8 inches above 4,000 ft.
Where's that coming from? Let's take a peek.
We know where it's coming from right there. Yeah, there it is. See, that's that's a low tweaking to the north of the high. Never as clean as you want it to be, but it that's that's what's going on, man. Okay. And we did that. We did that. Let's do surf. Awesome. Surf was good yesterday. Ocean Beach. Real windy.
Remember that storm warning? That's a big deal. You don't see I'm You see them, but not I don't know. I mean, I guess I've seen them before. And but not not on the rag for sure. Ocean Beach.
There are some sets. There's some sets today, too. This is in This is Mitchell's Cove, which I like. This is just at the tip of Santa Cruz. So, lighthouse is to your left, right over here.
Over here, here. This is Mitchell's.
This wave gets really good. But look at offshore. This is an example of wave wind shadow, right? Because it's in behind the point a little bit. The winds are blowing right past it. Then if you come in a little closer inside the cove further to Carmel, not Carmemell, but to um this is Pleasure Point, which is down by um Capola, you can see it, but you still see the wind offshore, but you're inside Monterey Bay now. The big winds are way out there. Way out there.
This is um Point Conception. The winds are a little bit stronger certainly because now you're further out in the ocean. You see the kite surfers. Funny thing about Point Conception, you guys will remember this.
I know you won't. Nobody remembers this.
It's so old. But when we start we used to surf there when they it was a great because it's kind of the ranch north but there's a good wave there called tarantulas and we this beach break the rivermouth was good too. But um we thought it was rocking for surfing but it gets windy every day like point conception just it's like point rays windy every day and we'd go there surfing and every day it took us years to realize oh so everybody started wind it became it's probably a hot spot for kite boarding wind surfing that type of thing. And it's funny because at that well those things were new enough I guess kite boarding and wind surfing back when we were doing it was pretty new believe it or not wasn't that that's how old I am. Um the food's running. I talked to Hudson. He says they're open through the weekend. He said it's going fast though. This is it. This is it you guys. Palisad's last chance. And you're not skiing down by the way. You're not skiing down. You are walking on your two feet. The eagles. The eagletits are doing well. They're self-feeding.
They're moving around.
They're uh Jackie and Shadow are adding sticks. The cool development this last few days is they're tracking. That means their eyesight is good. So people who know know I'm I'm stealing this from one of the blogs, but they're they're tracking behavior. So they're watching down in the valley. So it's right. It's a precursor to being able to hunt. Um and of course eyesight is everything to an eagle, right? Eagle eye, right? Um God, he must have really good vision. I never thought about eagle eye. Look at the trees blowing pretty good. That would be the wind. Um but they look good. Oh, and the babies are feeding themselves, too, which is kind of cool, right? They're um they're feeding themselves. We did a lot today. And then a little bit of wind down in Venice Beach today. Venice Beach is going to go 67° 68 degrees maybe. And that place, what a fun place to watch, right? Okay, so we did a lot. Pressure gradient, wind, fire. Let's make sure there's no fires.
I'm gonna refresh it real quick. If I run out of time, sorry. I've been doing that a lot lately. Um, new fire. Yeah, there's a fire right there. Brand new one here by Palmdale.
And there's the picture.
Little fire out by Palmdale. These cameras are awesome. This is Alert California. That's what they do. Now, you can see the wind, right? You see how laid down that um plume is? So, that's that's a wind blown fire. Now, it just started. They'll they'll dial it down pretty quick, but and there doesn't look like there's a lot out there, and there's not a lot of topography, so they should be able to get at it. But that's how quickly, just since we started this, there's a fire down in the Palmdale area in the Corral Fire they're calling it.
And it's 10 acres as of now. Okay. Talk to you tomorrow.
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