California fire season already off to an alarming start, meteorologists warn

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]All right, hello everybody. So, I'm the news director at uh KMPH here in Fresno, right about the middle part of the state. Uh joining us today are Ilya Naiman from our sister station in Bakersfield, Chris Kyper here from KMPH in Fresno, and Preston Donyan uh from KRCR up in Redding Chico market. So, we've got the entire uh Central Valley covered with the Sinclair contingent here. So, we're going to have a nice conversation today about what we uh all expect coming up uh for the summer season here. And Ilya, we're going to start with you in the south since you kind of got an active scene down there already. We've already started to see some of these spot fires pick up and then blow up because of the wind. So, uh what can you tell us about what we think uh is going to happen here?

[00:00:40]Well, you know, that it's like clockwork, predictable. Year after year, we've got these fires. Sometimes they start earlier, sometimes later. This is quite uh a scenario that we've got this this relatively big fire uh burning in the Simi Valley area of Eastern Ventura County. And you can see behind me the firefighters are in full force since yesterday. We've got the all sorts of apparatus, helicopters. We've got uh aircraft and a lot of firefighters from all over the place. And uh this situation, uh who knows if it's a telltale sign to come, but we're in May.

[00:01:13]And uh we had the Santa Ana winds kick in yesterday. That typically happens in September, October, November, December.

[00:01:20]It can happen in the mid to late spring.

[00:01:22]It happened this year because of the weather pattern. But as you can hear behind me, got those uh the fire copters coming through. They're doing quite a job on the fire. But this is already shaping up to be quite the busy season.

[00:01:35]Right now, in addition to this, we got a fire over the Channel Islands offshore.

[00:01:41]They're bringing firefighters by boat.

[00:01:43]Can you believe that? And when it started a few days ago, they couldn't even do air attack because of the winds and because of the marine layer that was making it difficult, if not dangerous, for uh an air attack. So, that is in the middle of the ocean south of Santa Barbara on the Channel Island. It's been It's been active and we're just watching going forward May to June, July it gets drier and drier the vegetation after a lot of rain this winter has blossomed has grown and now it's drying out and and the result as you can see behind me is it's a burned hillside and uh there could be more of that.

[00:02:21]Wow. So, we've already seen quite the start here and it's only late May. So, moving up to Chris Kuiper here a little bit further north from where you're at.

[00:02:29]Chris is here in Fresno. So, Chris from from your perspective, what is the outlook looking like here?

[00:02:35]I feel I hate to say it, but I don't think it's really that good.

[00:02:38]We should have the May gray out there on the coast side where I live is and lots of fog and moisture keeping all the the plants and whatnot juicy and hard to burn, but the Santa Ana winds do the exact opposite. They're draining all that moisture out of these fuels and whatnot and just getting ready even more so for fire season once we get into the blazing heat of July and August and September. So, and so these early season heat waves really work on the plants in a negative way. It's like negative rainfall pulling the moisture from the plants here and the plants just get drier quicker and they're ready to go unfortunately.

[00:03:11]The snow pack in the Sierra Nevada very low if even there at all and that's always a timed release kind of watering pattern for the forest and the foothills there around the forest as well.

[00:03:22]So, even though the rain stops April or May or so, you get that snow pack just continuing to to melt into June and July and it keeps the plants and the brush and the fuels nice and green through them.

[00:03:33]It's stopped raining. The snow pack is about gone and the plants and trees are ready to start drying out here as we speak. And so, it's an early start to fire season and it looks like by the time we get to July and August and September, the plants are going to be really dry out there unfortunately. I check something called the energy release component here. It's early in the season, but it's still a show on the plants right now are at dryness levels that you usually see in July. So, again, things are drying out fast and that's never a good sign for our season.

[00:04:02]Wow. Yeah, it's very very dry already.

[00:04:05]Moving up north to Preston, Preston, you you're no no stranger to dryness up in up in the Redding Chico area each year Shasta County we are typically reporting on fires from from your neck of the woods. What have you seen so far up there and what do you expect?

[00:04:21]Well, I think what we've seen so far this spring is kind of a reflection of the state as a whole. We had some really good periods in the winter, then we entered this very bizarre March. It was the hottest and driest in a lot of our climate data locations, whether that's Redding, Red Bluff, Chico, or Mount Shasta City up near the the state border seeing that hottest and driest March.

[00:04:39]And so, we saw a rapid depletion of that snowpack early and then April was this kind of quick fix, but it was more of a band-aid than a true medicine for that melting that we saw in March. And we've seen all of that April snow already basically disappear. At Lassen Volcanic National Park the Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center at an elevation of almost 7,000 ft it's completely barren and they're pretty close to opening the park road there. Now, that's not necessarily crazy early, but the snow numbers are pretty dire out there. In fact, this was the lowest snowpack on April 1st at Helen Lake just down from Lassen Peak on record tied with 2015 for the lowest going back to 1980. So, really very limited snow out there. But, there's the other part of the story where the rain has been pretty good. I think we've all seen that throughout the state that pretty typical rain values overall through that water year. You know, here in Northern California we're kind of between 80 and 120% of normal rainfall.

[00:05:33]So, the valley's kind of doing its normal progression from that green to turning the golden state into not just the state motto, but the way things look out there. The grasses are drying, but we're also seeing the mountains kind of catch up a little faster than usual.

[00:05:45]That's been the the big thing that stood out here in Northern California is big mountain peaks are really starting to melt off quickly and we're starting to see some green up out there at altitudes that usually wait another month or two.

[00:05:56]So, it looks like it's going to be a prolonged fire season that starts early and has that potential continuing to the fall like we would normally expect.

[00:06:03]Yeah, it's a really setting up to be an interesting year. I know we've been talking about the snowpack up in the mountains. It was really really thin up certainly up north where you're at and it was actually a little bit bigger down here where Chris and and Ilya are. So, it was a really interesting pattern for snow that melted quickly, right? You're already seeing reservoir levels at 99% up in like Oroville because they're getting all that snow runoff, which is what Chris has been talking about. So, I kind of want to just keep it in in the speak in this gallery view here and just ask kind of maybe Preston Chris and then Ilya the same question. So, as as our audience gears up for this this summer season where they're going to be traveling, they're going to be out and out and about, what why do they not want to just rely on like their phone app to to say, "Oh, it's going to be 97 on Friday. It's going to be fine." Instead instead, how do they rely on you all to tell the weather story in advance of things that may be impacting their lives? And we'll start with Preston and go to Chris and Ilya.

[00:06:58]Well, it's a great question because a lot of people the convenience of that app is right there. It's super easy, pick it up and go. But what these are doing is you're you're thinking about this is an Apple weather app or or a you know, Android app that is just putting out a forecast for everybody. And with that scale, the quality is going to be diminished. And so, basically what's happening with those forecast apps that are just pre-downloaded on your phone, they're taking raw model data most of the time and just throwing it in there.

[00:07:22]And often in the summer, that's going to perform pretty well because the models can handle normal conditions. But when we start to get into these weird events, right? Ilya mentioned fire season starting early there. We had north winds running down the Central Valley early here in the season. We had that event this past weekend as we record here in the middle of May. This is something that could happen again and again. And those north winds on a micro scale can lead to really dangerous fire conditions on a small, you know, regional scale.

[00:07:46]And so, when we talk about these fire weather patterns, they're something that can be very localized and something that's not picked up by these global scale models that are providing that forecast that just goes into your phone automatically. There's no human eyes, there's no kind of correction or fact-checking really that goes into the data that comes straight to your phone.

[00:08:03]Yeah, that's fantastic. And then Chris Kuiper, I know in Fresno we call weather alert days usually a couple days in advance. In fact, we just did that last week. Why why is telling the weather story days in advance super important for folks? Well, so people have a chance to prepare. And just if there something needs to be if they need to prepare for some reason, they have that opportunity to do that. Like Preston was saying, those models they they tend to kind of trend towards climatology. And if there's an extreme event, they sometimes have a little bit of a difficulty with that.

[00:08:32]Think back here in the San Joaquin Valley back in December, we had all that fog and that cloud cover that was just hanging around for weeks and weeks there. So, models were kept trying to burn it off there in the afternoon time.

[00:08:43]It wasn't happening. So, we said cloudy there for 2 weeks straight. And models really had a difficult time with that.

[00:08:49]Kind of a weird event.

[00:08:50]But again, those weird events sometimes models don't do fantastic with that. I know up in northern California, there's a few little microclimates there.

[00:08:58]The Feather River Canyon gets some very gusty winds overnight only in the canyon. Other places could be totally calm. And that's what fueled the Camp Fire and the North Complex Fire up there as well. And so, these little tiny microclimates sometimes models don't do fantastic with that. And maybe you need a little bit more of a human eye, a human touch with those. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And then Ilia, obviously you're out out on scene showing us what's going on, which my app on my my Apple phone isn't doing right now. You're you're literally boots on the ground there. So, what kind of microclimate issues do you do you think you run into out in the south end of our viewing area?

[00:09:32]>> Well, here's the thing tying that into the apps and the microclimates. The other night, on my phone it said rain is going to be ending soon in Bakersfield.

[00:09:40]Guess what? We had not even a cloud in the sky. I don't know where that rain that it saw came from, but you always have to recognize that the weather that's happening is dynamic, is changing, and there as President pointed out that the the the model data, even if it's fine resolution, it's only so good and it's not it it's not as good as people that are able to see what's happening. And then you use your empirical evidence and you use your experience and you know your area well, that's why you've got local meteorologists that are located in places where you're watching the weather patterns as they play out month after month, year after year, decade after decade. And so these little changes that that can happen are easy to miss and and and they're not always uh noted by the numerical guidance. But when you can put these things together in a real-time situation like a setting like currently we have behind me or any day-to-day situation, you need to have that uh you know, authoritative uh person that is watching, that is uh immersed in this, and that has uh seen sometimes the models and the data say one thing and yet the actual facts on the ground say something else. I'll give you an example. Yesterday, this fire popped up due to the fact that we had this burst of Santa Ana winds. It didn't start the fire, but it spread it, and it went up this hillside up the mountains, and now they're still fighting it the next day even though the winds are a lot weaker now. But then mid-afternoon yesterday, the winds did an about-face.

[00:11:13]They came from the north and east and they reversed to the south and west, and that took the huge plume of smoke that today is just a a small fragment of what we saw 24 hours previously, and instead of the smoke going towards the ocean behind me, it turned around and went across the San Fernando Valley. Now today you've got millions of people under a an air quality alert because of the hazardous air because that smoke was sent into LA. You're talking about people that are far from the fire, but the smoke was shifted out there because of the change in wind that occurred in a matter of minutes. And that is one of the microclimates we have in Southern California that goes from the offshore to the onshore wind and anything in between. And we saw this 24 hours ago and that is something that the firefighters are dealing with today and no doubt going forward into the summer, there'll be more microclimates in action across our beautiful state, California.

[00:12:07]Now, that's fantastic. Really, really good. I think that's a great perspective from each one of you from our respective markets from Redding to Fresno and all the way down to the South part down by Bakersfield all the way up there really into the great buying which you guys coming down there. So, very good very just good discussion.

[00:12:23]Maybe one last question for all three of you. I'll just keep it on the gallery view here. Your overall thoughts and predictions for this fire season. We'll go with Preston first and then Elia and then wrap it up.

[00:12:34]Well, I think you know, what I learned in kind of preparing to to talk today was that you can look at all of these different indices that tell us, okay, you know, where are our water levels at?

[00:12:43]What's our snowpack at? You know, how green are the mountain vegetation index, you know, coming up here in May? And what you'll find is that no matter how many proxies you have between one year and the next, they can end up completely different. And so, I think to make a very authoritative forecast saying this is going to be the worst fire year ever, it's about as foolish as saying there's going to be no fires at all, right? We can never pin things down with just the limited data that we have throughout human history. That's just not going to give us necessarily enough to put together an exact, you know, way to put to take your rain and and convert it into a fire season because 2015 was this terrible snow year throughout the state.

[00:13:20]That's the other one that was lower than what we saw in 2026, but it's not a great proxy, especially here in Northern California where the state's three largest reservoirs are, they were about half as full as they are today. So, there's very big differences in water availability on that scale. And so, we can't necessarily take a past year and go, "Well, this is exactly how this is going to be." I think that the story is we know that the deck is stacked towards a warm, dry summer that's going to be dry in the mountains longer than it normally would be. So, it's probably going to be an extended fire season. And the deck is stacked towards more active fire behavior in terms of acreage and the number of fires. But, can we say exactly what this is going to be? Is this going to be another 2018? Is this going to be another 2015? That's just not something that we can do because again, year by year, things are so, so different. Yeah. Right. Chris?

[00:14:07]Completely agree with all that.

[00:14:08]Completely agree. Uh I was just looking at past histories and there were a few times when the snowpack was really low, we were in a drought going into the winter anyways. The following fire season was just kind of bad. Uh and then there are other times where we had a average year of rainfall, the snowfall was good, it turned out to be a terrible fire year. So, I Yeah, odds are that it is going to be a not such a great fire year. It is probably above average fires.

[00:14:32]If you want to go by the odds, but that's not 100%. It's not a, you know, if this happens, then this happens.

[00:14:38]There's always that little range of outcomes and occasionally, uh you get a little bit of a wildcard out there. And speaking of wildcards, we've got El Niño. It looks like it's going to be developing and while that usually influences our winter in some way or form, uh in the summertime, it can influence us by giving us more tropical systems here. We don't get hit with tropical storms in California, but we see the leftovers, the remnants, the moisture uh come onshore and sometimes that just gives us some rain in the mountains and washes out any kind of fire starts with the lightning. Uh like uh Hurricane uh um Hurricane Hilary did just a few years ago. Got a whole bunch of rain out of it. No really uh significant fires uh started out of it.

[00:15:17]Uh Tropical Storm Fausto in 2020 had started all kinds of fires there. The August complex, the the North complex, uh the LNU the the old alphabet complex there. Uh really made it for a bad fire season. Hurricane Olaf in Central California in 2021 started the Windy complex and the KNP complex. So, sometimes it can, if there's dry lightning, sometimes not. So, El Nino's a little bit of a wild card as well.

[00:15:42]Yeah, absolutely. Ilya, do you see any wild card wild cards in uh the Bakersfield market?

[00:15:49]Yes. Uh you know, this is something that we deal with uh on a um this time of year, sometimes on a daily basis. You know, a lot of these fires are uh at at as our colleagues up north were saying, it's not easy to predict what the season will be like months in advance because there's multiple factors that play into it, whether it's El Nino, which is kind of hit or miss. Many people think it has to do with a lot of rain in California.

[00:16:13]We've seen El Ninos that were very dry.

[00:16:15]The summer pattern leading into El Nino is a lot more murky. Uh it could be as a result of wind that just ki- kicks up for a mat- in a matter of minutes and in a hot spot comes up. Like, for example, last few minutes, I don't know if you saw, we had a bit of a breeze kicked in and now we've got a a hot spot behind me, darker smoke rising. So, these kinds of things are daily occurrences. We call them diurnal patterns. You've got the the the nighttime, the temperatures drop, the humidity levels rise.

[00:16:43]Firefighters get an upper hand over the daytime, the opposite happens, the temperatures rise. Um erratic fire behavior comes through, the winds pick up, sometimes they shift like we saw yesterday. But, going forward, we combine things uh that Chris was saying like the snowpack or the lack of it or a lot of rain we had this winter. You would think that would be a good thing and it is. But, in the summertime, all of the vegetation dries out and it leads to more combustibility, more fuel for the fire. And people tend to forget fire is part of the ecology of California.

[00:17:14]It's not a it's not unusual, it's not abnormal. It it's the lay of the land here. But when we start to move into places that we want to live in cuz they're beautiful, they're gorgeous, we call them the wildland urban interface, well the result is you have situations like this where a hillsides are burning and and houses are right up next to them and now you have to figure out how to best save the assets, the property, human life obviously comes first and property you know, comes in after that. And so making these predictions, the most predictable thing about fire season is that it's always happening and summertime typically is the leading into the peak of it and then summer into the fall especially for Southern California it starts to go into the Santa Ana season which is at the end of summer into early winter. Last year we had the crazy fires in LA in January which was unusual but something that is an example of an occurrence that can happen if the conditions are right or if you would want to say it another way if the conditions are wrong. So what's predictable about this is that this is something that occurs and you just have to be prepared for it and you have to um make sure your information is accurate, it's relevant, it's up-to-date and and and you have to work as a team whether it's from the newsroom to the classroom to the law enforcement firefighters and then to the residences all people that live in these areas have to work together to mitigate the damage that these types of events can can lead to when when they occur in our beautiful state of California. Yeah, that's really well said. I think you're right on the money with the the wildland user interface. We have more of that in the state of California top to bottom than most states probably do total. So I think I'm glad you guys are all watching out for our audiences in respective markets in our respective markets here throughout the Central Valley. It's been a really good conversation here and I look forward to having you guys keeping us posted on things ahead of time. Keep us ahead of it all.

[00:19:14]Thank you very much, guys. I appreciate it. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

[00:19:18]>> Thank you.

[00:19:19]Thanks.