Thursday July 25, 2024
San Francisco Chronicle —
While California’s reservoirs are currently 116% of normal for this time of year, other signs of drought are quickly creeping in. The reason: July’s extreme heat.
“We’ve supercharged our drying,” said John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at UC Merced.
Over the past few weeks, the atmosphere has been extremely thirsty, Abatzoglou said, pulling out large amounts of moisture from live vegetation and dead fuels.
The indicator points to increased fire risk, beyond grasslands into higher elevation forests.
Scientists refer to this thirst as evaporative demand. The map above shows how anomalous the demand for atmospheric moisture was from June 20 to July 19, compared with the same period from 1979 to 2016.