Santa Anas Peak Today, New Wildfire Challenge Arrives this Weekend: Rain & Potential Mudslides
Santa Ana winds and critical fire weather continue to be the big story through the end of the work week with same drastic changes this week—that present new challenges to crews battling wildfires.
Winds aren’t a widespread factor for the Coachella Valley and remain confined to mainly the mountains, foothills, passes and coastal slopes but are expected to gradually decrease into Friday morning. That said, conditions will stay very dry with single digit relative humidity until we see a surge of atmospheric moisture this weekend.
We’ve already seen some very gusty winds today with strongest winds coming out of the San Diego County mountains. Our peak gusts in higher elevations have ranged from 60-90mph. Sill Hill (a common higher elevation wind prone area in the SD mountains) clocked a 91 mph gust. Again, want to emphasize that this is localized to higher mountain elevations and passes—not widespread or valley wide.
Friday looks like our transition day. We’ll see much cooler high temperatures along the coast with more cooling expected to spread inland into the weekend and next week. By Sunday many Coachella Valley locations are looking at daytime highs 8-15 degrees below normal in the mid to upper 50s.
The winds dying down is great news for wildfires, but it’s immediately followed by a new threat for Southern California—debris flow and mudslides near burn scars from rain and mountain snow headed our way next week.
This weekend and early next week our changes come from a cold low pressure system diving south from Canada which is expected to bring a significant drop in temperatures and some widespread showers along with mountain snow for late Saturday through Tuesday. As of right now rainfall totals look fairly light but will be widespread enough that they’ll likely impact road conditions and outdoor activities. You may also see snow on the road if you’re traveling this weekend through the passes, because of this we’ve issued a First Alert Weather Alert for all day Sunday.
Since this is a cold system arriving this weekend, snow levels fall pretty drastically and we’re looking at snow falling in the mountains. Snow levels start around 4000-5000’ for Saturday night into Sunday, then fall to 3500-4500’ Sunday night into Monday. Snow levels on Monday likely stay around 3500-4000’ through the day. We could see 7-12” of new snow above 7,000’—great news for our local ski resorts!
We’ll slowly see temperatures warm slightly Tuesday through Thursday—but still remain below seasonal levels. Look for drier conditions returning by mid next week.
