Warm weather is returning soon to Northern California. Will fire risk come with it?
Cooler, cloudier conditions in Sacramento and across most of Northern California will last a couple of more days, before warmer and windier conditions reappear in the forecast early next week.
Sacramento’s highs are forecast to re-enter the low 80s by Monday. The city is predicted to hit 86 degrees by Tuesday and 88 by Thursday, which would be about 10 degrees hotter than normal for mid-October.
Temperatures will be similar throughout the valley, with the foothills and Bay Area set to warm up considerably by the middle of next week.
The current weather system that has already dropped Sacramento’s high temperature from 93 degrees Tuesday to 74 on Thursday had also been expected, in earlier forecasts from the National Weather Service, to bring moderate and widespread rainfall this weekend across the north half of the state.
Instead, it appears only light showers will materialize in the far north reaches of the state: the northern Sacramento Valley near Redding, the North Coast and the northern Sierra Nevada mountains and their foothills, according to the NWS.
Sacramento is forecast to get no rain at all.
More gusty winds incoming. Is there wildfire risk?
Very gusty winds are expected Saturday in the Lake Tahoe basin, where the NWS Reno office recently issued a fire weather watch. That’s one step below a red flag warning, which often comes closer to 24 hours before critical wildfire weather is anticipated.
The weather office warns that wind gusts between 30 mph to 45 mph will produce “significant” fire risk, as they meet with “extremely dry vegetation” this weekend in the greater Lake Tahoe region. The warning includes the eastern edges of Alpine, El Dorado, Placer, Mono and Nevada counties in California, along with wide swaths of western Nevada.
By Sunday and Monday, gusty northerly winds will emerge along the coast and in the valley, reaching up to 25 mph near Sacramento. In the Napa-Sonoma Wine Country area, where crews have made solid progress battling the Glass Fire, gusts are currently expected to reach 15 mph.
Wind outlook beyond Monday is less clear. The wind event that led the Glass Fire, California’s 10th-most destructive wildfire on record, to erupt in its first 48 hours late last month included gusts well over 30 mph.
This weekend’s light showers aren’t expected to be anywhere near enough to end the 2020 wildfire season, but conditions from the current storm track have already offered relief to crews battling existing wildfires, some of which have been burning since mid-August.
Calmer winds, lower temperatures and increased humidity in the past few days have boosted containment efforts on a few major Northern California incidents, including the 1 million-acre August Complex at Mendocino National Forest and the Glass Fire east of Santa Rosa, according to updates from the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire.
Some light rain could fall Saturday on parts of the August Complex — a record-smashing 1 million-acre wildfire cluster burning primarily in Mendocino National Forest in Tehama County. That sprawling fire is 65% contained, the Forest Service said in a Friday morning update.
