September gales; CA firestorm wipes whole towns off map

A bad hair day alert has been issued by the Huttner Weather Lab.

Weather Headlines

• Sustained winds of 20+ mph and gusts to 40+ mph howl across Minnesota today.

• Whitecaps abound on Minnesota lakes.

• Waves reach 2 to 4 feet on bigger lakes this afternoon.

• Small craft advisories are in effect for parts of Lake Superior.

• Entire California towns "wiped off the map in minutes" by firestorm

Ides of September

Weird things can happen with Minnesota weather in mid-September. The clash of seasons is nigh. Stronger pressure systems now battle for control of the Upper Midwest.

Today's weather fare? High winds, driven by the clash zone between a strong, stalled high pressure system over Appalachia and low pressure in the Dakotas. Note the tight packing of isobars over Minnesota at the start of the loop below.

Whistling winds

Southerly winds peak this afternoon. I won't be shocked to see some whistling wind gusts over 40 mph today across Minnesota. Hang on to you hat. Children. Small pets.

Warm again too

Montevideo put a 90 on the board Monday afternoon. The inbound air mass produced 100 degrees in northern Nebraska Monday. I expect more cities to approach the 90 degree mark in western Minnesota the next two days. The Twin Cities could peak above guidance between 85 and 87 degrees.

The warmer and more humid air mass may support a few scattered thundershowers as the front moves closer this week. The best chance for a wetting is early Thursday morning for the metro and eastern Minnesota.

Bigger picture? Florida gets soaked by tropical storm remnants. California may get some much needed but spotty showers.

Fall Friday, fab weekend

Friday's cool front returns us to September reality. We string together two consecutive perfect September weekends in a row? Yes, we are leading charmed weather lives in Minnesota this summer.

California firestorm wipes entire towns off map in minutes

No that's not weather terrorist hype. That's the reality of what happened in California towns like Middletown and Cobb this week. In 2003 I was on the air live breaking the news as a firestorm swept through the town of Summerhaven, Ariz., in the mountains above Tucson.

I've never seen anything like the explosive fire behavior we witnessed in California this week. One third of the residents of Lake County California are gone from their homes, under evacuation orders. Hundreds will return to find ashes where they lived a week ago.

Here's more on the tragic events in California this week from The Press Democrat.

As of this writing, almost a third of Lake County’s population is displaced and hundreds of homes and businesses are gone, destroyed in a conflagration that’s still burning out of control.

The vast scale of the damage and upheaval is difficult to fathom, conjuring visions of some distant war.

This is the third catastrophic wildfire to strike Lake County in six weeks, fulfilling the worst fears about tinder-dry conditions brought on by a drought now in its fourth year.

Many of the families who fled Middletown, Loch Lomond and other small towns as the Valley fire raced across southern Lake County don’t know when they will be allowed to return — or whether they will find their homes still standing.

Kent Porter, a Press Democrat staff photographer who grew up in Lake County, spent the weekend on the front lines. His photos of flames and devastation tell the story of a blaze that has challenged and, at times, overwhelmed the resources of the 1,400 men and women defending lives and property in the fire’s path. His description, shared with colleagues in an email, add another dimension to the still developing story:

“I am floored by the amount of devastation I’ve seen,” Porter wrote Monday morning. “Whole communities were wiped off the map in a matter of minutes. We all have friends up there, families and people we’ve met in passing. What struck me the most is the utter completeness of this disaster.

“Virtually nothing is left above the proper of Cobb. The houses are down to foundations, even some chimneys are gone. Driving through the area is like looking at a ghost community. So much gone, so many ways of life disrupted, so much hardship remains for the people affected.

“In Middletown, you can draw a line where firefighters stopped the fire. They saved downtown. Anderson Springs is nearly 80 percent wiped out, same goes for the homes along (Highway) 175 in the canyon to Cobb. Hidden Valley suffered losses too as did Hobergs and Adams Springs.”

As of Monday afternoon, 61,000 acres — about 95 square miles — had burned, with 400 homes and hundreds of other structures destroyed. One person had died, and about 19,000 people were evacuated in a county with a little more than 63,000 residents.

California snow-pack was lowest in 500 years

The seed of today's fires were sewn last winter as California endured the worst snow-pack conditions in 500 years. The Los Angeles Times highlights the new study from the journal Nature Climate Change.

When California Gov. Jerry Brown stood in a snowless Sierra Nevada meadow on April 1 and ordered unprecedented drought restrictions, it was the first time in 75 years that the area had lacked any sign of spring snow.

Now researchers say this year’s record-low snowpack may be far more historic — and ominous — than previously realized.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists estimate that the amount of snow in the Sierra Nevada was the lowest in more than 500 years.

“We were expecting that 2015 would be extreme, but not like this,” said senior study author Valerie Trouet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona.

The report is the latest in a series of studies that have sought to characterize the depth of California’s four-year drought and place it in a broader historic context. It joins a growing body of research warning that global warming will reduce the amount of snow blanketing California mountains — a development that will reduce the state’s available water, even as its population continues to grow.

“This is probably the biggest water supply concern our state is facing,” said Mark Gold, associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability at UCLA who was not involved in the new study. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 11.”

The issue, according to UC Davis hydrology expert Helen Dahlke, is that with climate change, there will be much less snow and more rain.

“That water will just be going into the ocean unless we can figure out a way to capture some of that water quickly,” said Dahlke, who was not part of Trouet’s study team.