Weather Modeling Showing No Rain In LA Through January; This Rainy Season, 0.16" Of Precipitation In All
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The NWS expects offshore winds gusting to 70mph, especially in Ventura and Los Angeles counties between Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon, bringing relative humidity down as low as 5% and allowing for extreme fire behavior and long-range transport of burning embers. Conditions in Ventura county in particular could be worse than last week. Within the next few days, fuels will reach record-dry for this time of year all the way up the central coast and potentially into the Bay Area. Fuel dryness – the amount of water that has been removed from trees, grasses and shrubs by the current drought – is approaching and will soon exceed what’s typically seen at the peak of the wildfire season in mid-summer across coastal southern California.
This year’s rainy season is running at just 2% of normal for Los Angeles, which has only seen 0.16in of rain so far. Weather models increasingly indicate that southern California will receive no rain at all during the rest of January, and potentially no rain during the first week or two of February as well. That’s really unusual. January and February are the wettest months of the year for Los Angeles, averaging more than 7in of the city’s 13in of rain in a typical year. Even in the winter of 2006-2007, LA’s driest year in history, the city still received a little more than 3in of rain.
Intensifying drought conditions mean that the current round of extremely out-of-season fire weather will continue with the resurgence of any moderate-to-strong Santa Ana winds. There are emerging signs in longer-range weather models that the current weather pattern could get sticky – and settle into what’s called a blocking pattern. If a blocking pattern, specifically a “Rex block” sets up, it would continue to shunt Pacific moisture either north into Alaska or further south into Mexico, worsening California’s drought.
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Early January also marked the official arrival of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which tend to precede drought years in southern California. Factoring in the next seven months of seasonal climate forecasts, Los Angeles is on track for between 4-7in of rain for the remainder of this year’s rainy season, with some potential wiggle room above and below that range. Should this forecast hold, dangerous fire weather would continue not just during the next several weeks, but well into the summer and beyond – and could spread north in California.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/13/california-wildfire-weather-conditions-forecast