Alaska blowtorch and California fires driven by weird winter winds

While swaths of Southern California literally burn, Alaska has been figuratively doing so. The 49th state should be encased in a frozen slurry of snow and ice during mid-January but raging winds and incredibly warm temperatures have ruled instead.

This relative lull in wintry weather to worry about is punctuated by signals of a changing climate.

Weather watch

Missing: Winter in Alaska. Temperatures 30 to 40 degrees or more above average covered most of Alaska Monday in the wake of a damaging windstorm and record warm readings over the weekend. Anchorage schools were closed to start the week due to widespread power outages and wind damage. Fairbanks, where Sunday’s high of 47 degrees was 48 degrees above average, also took it on the chin.

California fires burn on. Like this time last week, extremely critical fire weather plagues portions of Los Angeles and Ventura counties amid a broader threat stretching from San Luis Obispo to the border with Mexico. A new fire started near Ventura on Monday night and initially quickly spread, pushed along by gusts reaching 35 to 60 mph. “Particularly dangerous” fire conditions are expected through Wednesday.

Tuesday Take

Noted space laser aficionado Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is suggesting making it rain. Not that kind.

Actually making it rain!

There is some legitimate science behind cloud seeding — a process of delivering tiny particles of, primarily, silver iodide to the kind of clouds that might produce rain. It’s done in hopes of pushing those clouds over the edge into spilling the goods.

Arid agricultural regions of North Dakota and Texas have long-term projects associated with the science. But nothing like that can be found in Greene’s thought process.

Over the weekend, she opined on the conspiracy theory web site X: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?” They know how to do it.”

I’ll let you deduce who they are based on her history. [link: Jon Stewart Monday night]

Anyway — when in drought, as is the case in Southern California at the moment, clouds can be hard to come by. Maybe we need to start with industrial fog machines and work upward from there.

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As a forecaster, journalist and certified weather freak (there's a badge, trust me), a big part of my job is analyzing the playing field of global weather and related climate change stories to decide which ones to spend more time on.

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