Davis Fire Weather Update - September 12, 2024

hello everyone my name is Bladen bright Rider and I'm an incident meteorologist with the National Weather Service here to give you a weather update for today Thursday September 12th so before we go into anything that's happening today I want to take a step back and look at kind of what happened yesterday if you're in the local area you're probably aware that we had what is called a particularly dangerous situation Red Flag Warning these are incredibly uncommon in fact the last one that was issued by the National Weather Service in Reno was done so back in 2019 and I believe overall they've only ever issued six of these PDS rfw particularly dangerous situation red flag warnings uh and they're what they're considered as very high-end red flag warnings meaning that they're not necessarily seeing that very typical you know gust to 20 or 30 m an hour and and relative humidity that's down around 15% they're looking at much more extreme conditions usually looking at singled digigit relative humidity uh values during the day and then we're looking at winds that are getting in excess of over 50 mph so what we saw yesterday was this guy uh this is a big upper low uh we could also just call it an upper disturbance uh it started to track in from the Pacific Northwest and this is actually what's dropping a bunch of precept up there that white that you see on this water vapor imagery is going to be a lot of the showers the thunderstorms and the like that is coming out of this disturbance but what comes around on the southern end here which is what hit us in this area here were just a lot of winds and a lot of dry air with those winds so if we look at the map here what we saw across the high terrain uh this is getting into Mount Rose and then slide Mountain if we go a little bit off map we started to see anywhere from 70 to 75 M an hour during the afternoon and even in the overnight periods we were still seeing gusts up around 60 MPH as we got off of the high terrain into the highlands and some of these lowland valleys down here we were still seeing gusts around 50 to 60 MPH and even as up as 40 m an hour as we got into the evening hours in addition to those incredibly extreme winds we saw relative humidity values get into those single digits and they weren't just doing it when is typical which is usually in the mid to late afternoon hours they were doing it overnight and even into the evening so that's incredibly uncommon that's taking you know conditions that we see in the afternoon and displacing them and putting them at night when we should be seeing our best humidity recovery when we should be seeing winds that are a little bit calmer and easier to manage in the case of a fire environment so it was a very prolonged event it was a very extreme event and yet we had this footprint here that didn't really move at all so huge Kudos out to everybody that was working this incident yesterday and the days ahead of this because we knew it was coming uh so that they were able to prepare and get this ready because I have been on a fire with those same conditions very similar footprint that did not react in the same fashion so that's really quite incredible work by them the good news is starting today we have much quieter weather looking at winds today primarily out of the North maybe the north northwest or a little bit to the Northeast uh and when I talk about winds I want to make sure everybody knows I'm saying from the north from the Northwest from the Northeast uh that gets you a good vantage point when I'm talking about how this stuff is supposed to move and how that can actually impact the fire so if these were stronger winds that could be challenging for that southern line down there but for the good the good news is for the most part the these winds are going to be very very light we're expecting wind gusts today to maybe at their most on the lowland areas reach about 12 mph as we get onto the high terrain where we see more of our general winds maybe we see more 15 to 20 M an hour but that's a lot better than what we saw on Wednesday with that anywhere from 50 to 75 mph our relative humidity much improved so we're going from single digits getting back into the 20 to 30% range so that's going to be a huge help to kind of get those fuels recovered down on the ground in addition to that it's going to be very stable so a lot of times you'll hear meteorologists when we're in fire weather we'll talk about instability or the Hanes index and all that's talking about is Air's propensity to rise air is like me it is tired it just wants to fall down so when we have unstable air which is what we don't want in a fire situation that's when we can see a lot of upscale growth and that's what can help Feel That Fire to become more extreme so behind cold fronts in this case we're not looking at any amounts of instability there's a lot of stable air out there so it should be a very very quiet day for them today and tomorrow now as we get into the weekend that's when things get a little bit more complicated we have another disturbance you know very similar in style to this guy it's going to track a little bit different differ though whereas this one came and hit a lot of the northern uh Northwestern portion of the continental US the one that'll be coming in that's well off map at this point will actually come down and it looks like its Center might actually position right over us as we go into the Sunday Monday time frame that is more likely assuming that it actually takes the track that the models are suggesting that is suggesting that we will see less win with this event and we likely will see more precipitation uh so we're starting to look into that 50 to 60% range for a chance for pre-ip as we get into Monday and so that could be a really really huge help as well as we're moving forward and moving into next week much colder temperatures too I know we just talked about we had a cold front come through and we we've gone from like the upper 80s lower 90s in this area down into what is beautiful 60° weather today with the system is on the docket to hit us next week we could be looking at much more fall-like temperatures with some of these areas not even getting out of the lower 50s during the day next week so keep your eye on that and stay tuned we'll have more information as we get a better handle on what actually the models are starting to come in agreement on uh moving forward so that's all I got for you guys today thank you so much and have a good one