Name: Here’s why the Bay Area faces extreme fire danger this weekend
Brand: sfchronicle.com
SKU: sfchronicle-com-23
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Here’s why the Bay Area faces extreme fire danger this weekend

preview

Photo: Paul Chinn / The ChronicleA mass of cold air moving in from Western Canada and through the Great Basin is responsible for the extreme fire risk the Bay Area faces this weekend.Gusts up to 100 mph on some North Bay peaks, combined with unusually dry vegetation, could easily turn a spark into a wildfire.“What we have going on is a system that we like to call the inside slider,” said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Bay Area, using a baseball analogy. That is because the “low and inside” air is cold and coming from inland, as opposed to off the Pacific Ocean, Garcia said.These are the and they are created when that cold, high-pressure air moving into the region contrasts to low-pressure systems nearer to the coast.“The greater the difference in pressure, the stronger the wind,” Garcia said.That cold, dry air moving through the Great Basin area in Nevada and other western states will then drain westward through the Sierra Nevada, gaining speed as it moves down into California’s Central Valley like “water spilling over the edge of the dam,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.Swain said the wind will accelerate and dry out as it moves down the mountain slopes toward lower elevations in the Bay Area, where it will create the conditions for red flag fire warnings that have been issued by the National Weather Service through the weekend.The warnings will take effect Sunday and run through Tuesday morning and have raised the likelihood that PG&amp;E will to large parts of its service areas to avoid its equipment sparking a blaze.Winds will likely be strongest overnight Sunday into Monday morning, said meteorologist Jan Null, although he added that wind events like this one are not unusual.Null said while the region has seen a relatively normal amount of rain this year, what is unusual was the low rainfall the previous year, when many places in the Bay Area had close to half their normal rainfall.“Vegetation is at record dryness levels for this time of this year,” and primed to burn, Swain said, comparing conditions to those during the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County last year and fires that ravaged the North Bay in 2017.At the water’s edge, there is potential for 5% relative humidity, according to Garcia, the NWS meteorologist.“To me, it’s a mind-blown-type emoji,” he said.Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter:Bay BriefingTrends

A mass of cold air moving in from Western Canada and through the Great Basin is responsible for the extreme fire risk the Bay Area faces this weekend.Gusts up to 100 mph on some North Bay peaks, combined with unusually dry vegetation, could easily turn a spark into a wildfire.“What we have going on is a system that we like to call the inside slider,” said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Bay Area, using a baseball analogy. That is because the “low and inside” air is cold and coming from inland, as opposed to off the Pacific Ocean, Garcia said.These are the and...

public

Chase DiFeliciantonio

Delivering the Bay Area’s best journalism every day. Subscribe and support the newsroom: http://SFChronicle.com/subscribe

sfchronicle.com

Credible

Speculation

Anecdotal Evidence

Generalization

Stacking the Deck

Appeal to Authority

Straw Man

Slippery Slope

Emotional Appeal

Red Herring

False Dilemma

Illogical

Moral Equivalency

Ad Hominem

Correlation w/o Causation

Semantics

Begging the Question

Faulty Analogy

Non Sequitur

Bandwagon

Dogmatism

Failing Occam's Razor

Biased

Pure Opinion

Hit Piece

Racial Bias

National Bias

Religious Bias

Financial Incentive

Political Agenda

Gender Bias

Misused Image/Video

Study Misinterpreted

Mistake

Misused Term

Science Misrepresented

Factual Error

Satire

Surface Level

Lack of Reliable Sources

Sensational

Not Credible

Investigative

Balanced

Well Sourced

Great Context

sports

entertainment

U.S.

international

business

technology

science

culture

politics

media

health

Here’s why the Bay Area faces extreme fire danger this weekend

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS