You've heard of the forest fires now burning in Southern California ... bad news, of course. What nobody much talks about is why these unseasonable fires have happened.
The DrsC have been in SoCal since late December. The weather is everything the Chamber of Commerce could wish ... warm and dry days, cool nights that have stayed above freezing. Today reached the low 80s.
So far we've seen exactly zero rain. Basically it rarely rains in CA more than a trace during the May to October half of the year, November and April sometimes see rain, but mostly it is a December to March phenomenon, when it occurs.
The hillsides of the Los Padres National Forest are brown and barren this year, when they should have already become green. BTW, "forest fire" is a misnomer in SoCal. What burns is chaparral: grasses and scrub brush rarely more than head high. I grew up watching autumn fires burn across the chaparral-covered Coast Range mountains rimming the Ojai Valley.
Across the arid West the north sides of hills cast shade which enables scrub oak or pine to hoard enough scarce water to grow into modest trees ... elsewhere is mostly brush and weeds.
