Wildfire — Santa Lucia Mountains and Los Padres National Forest, California

2020-08-18 to 2020-08-31 · Santa Lucia Mountains and Los Padres National Forest, California

Event narrative

A vegetation fire (Carmel Fire) broke out the afternoon of the 18th in Sky Ranch in Carmel Valley as a spot off the River Fire https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/8/18/carmel-fire/. Multiple evacuations were ordered in the surrounding area with the fire ultimately destroying 73 structures and damaging 7. The combination of the Carmel and River fires rained down smoke and ash on surrounding cities. The fire was still burning at the end of August.

Wider weather episode

A prolonged and oppressive heat wave swept the Central Coast and Bay Area for almost a week from August 14th to August 19th with widespread record breaking temperatures observed across the region. This was caused by a strong high pressure system over the Desert Southwest that expanded westward into California. This dome of heat brought hot temperatures to the area for several days. Multiple days of triple digit afternoon highs were recorded inland with some coastal locations even reaching the mid 90s. Several days of hot and dry weather further dried fuels over the area increasing fire danger. During this event, a surge of monsoonal and tropical moisture from a former Tropical Storm advected northward with sufficient instability to generate multiple high based and dry thunderstorms that produced several thousand lightning strikes over the Greater Bay Area. Many locations saw wind gusts of 40-50 mph with isolated areas seeing gusts of 60-75 mph. This prompted the San Francisco Bay Area forecast office to issue a rare severe thunderstorm warning. These lightning strikes in combination with gusty and erratic outflow winds sparked hundreds of wildfires across the state of California. Several smaller fires combined to form complexes some of which are now among the largest wildfires in state history. Most of which were still actively burning at the end of August. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been burned with several hundred structures destroyed as well as a handful of deaths and injuries. Tens of thousands of residents were also forced to evacuate. Additionally, all of these wildfires burning simultaneously across the state gave the Bay Area the worst air quality in the world at one point.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 912892. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.