Hot conditions and Santa Ana winds will hit Southern California this week, beginning the fall wildfire season in earnest as the region continues to recover from January’s devastating firestorms.
Though no red flag warnings have yet been issued, both the Santa Clarita and San Fernando Valley foothills will have elevated fire risks once the winds arrive, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld.
October is traditionally the start of Southern California’s fire season as intense winds come from the east. But this October was marked by some wet conditions that fire officials said temporarily pushed back the fire danger.
But November is looking to be warmer, though the conditions are far less severe than last year. Although the fire danger has eased in Northern California because of wet conditions, Southern California still faces risks, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote on his weather blog.
“I don’t think we can safely declare fire season over — especially with a prolonged period of anomalously warm and dry conditions coming up. Recent precipitation, however, does put it in a very different position than this time last year, when some of the driest conditions on record were rapidly developing in the Southland leading up to the devastating January 2025 fires,” he wrote.
The warming trend is expected to start between Monday night and Tuesday morning when the winds shift into a Santa Ana pattern, Schoenfeld said. Temperatures across much of the Los Angeles Basin and into the Santa Clarita Valley will be in the upper 80s and low 90s, or 10 to 15 degrees above normal for this time of year, Schoenfeld said.
The winds will be mostly confined to the L.A. County mountains and foothills, she said. The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory from 10 a.m. Tuesday until 7 p.m. Wednesday for L.A. County, Orange County and the Inland Empire.
Tuesday and Wednesday are expected to be the hottest days, although warm temperatures are expected through the end of the week, according to Schoenfeld. Tuesday and Wednesday are expected to see temperatures in the mid-80s; temperatures are expected to be in the upper 70s to mid-80s on Thursday and Friday.
Schoenfeld recommended that those who live in high fire risk areas review evacuation plans and make sure they have a go-bag with essential items as wildfire season approaches.
Capt. David Dantic of the L.A. County Fire Department said that his agency will be constantly monitoring the heat and winds this week. Pre-positioned strike teams have also been staged in the Santa Clarita and Malibu areas.
“Hopefully it doesn’t get as hot as we think it’s gonna be and hopefully we don’t get those winds either,” he added.
Dantic said that it was too early to tell whether the new growth from recent thunderstorms would be helpful or not in terms of fire danger.
“It depends how hot it’s gonna get,” he said. “We always have to make sure we watch out for the factors that could start a fire.”
Dantic also said that Santa Ana wind events happen year-round now and that there were also Santa Ana winds in early January, coinciding with the devastating firestorms that wiped out homes in L.A. County.
Save for the January wildfires, this fire season has been relatively calm, he added.
“We’ve had starts throughout the year but nothing compared to what happened in January,” he said. “I think we’ve been lucky. We haven’t had as much brush activity as normal.”
Swaim said on his blog that the return of winds and heat in November and December could elevate the fire risk. But he stressed “conditions are presently nowhere near the level of exceptional aridity we had from Oct-Dec 2024 and there are no major offshore wind events currently in the forecast.”
Earlier this month, an atmospheric river storm hit Los Angeles with scattered downpours, fears of flooding and powerful winds.
Evacuation warnings were issued in areas affected by January’s wildfires — including the burn scars from the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire in Altadena, the Hurst fire in Sylmar and the Sunset fire in the Hollywood Hills.
The storm dumped about 2.17 inches of rain in Bel-Air, 2.10 inches in Beverly Hills, 1.27 inches in downtown Los Angeles and 3.28 inches in Woodland Hills. The last time downtown got more than an inch of rain in a single day in October was 2009, said John Dumas, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The storm also brought enough moisture to Southern California’s drought-stricken landscape to delay fire season for weeks, if not months, according to Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
At the start of October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that La Niña conditions had officially returned. The climate pattern typically drives drought conditions in Southern California.
Meteorologists say the previous La Niña, which extended from January until about April, played a significant role in the region’s dry winter, fueling the fires that devastated the Palisades and Altadena communities.
Times staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.