While Watching California Burn, Wishing We Could Send Vermont's Dreary Downpours To Them

Yesterday was as dreary a day as you can get in Vermont.

A foreboding, stormy, gloomy late autumn day Sunday
in my St. Albans, Vermont yard.

Stuck inside, I watched videos depicting parts of California burning amid arid, blowtorch gales. A few of the videos are at the bottom of this post.

 I also watched yet another drenching storm soak Vermont, keeping me from doing my outdoor autumn chores. It was a classic, dark, wet, foreboding late October day as we race toward winter.

I wished I could teleport all that rain and wetness to California.

Not that's it's been an ugly, awful month in Vermont. Quite the contrary.  We've had a lot of gorgeous days this autumn.  But the rainfall, especially in northern Vermont, is kind of impressive for October, which is normally a relatively dry month in Vermont.

A little over an inch of rain dropped into my unofficial rain gauge in St. Albans, Vermont, bringing the month's total to 6.4 inches. That surely must put us in the top 10 wettest list for Octobers. Again, we haven't had a lot of rainy days, really. It's just that this month, when it rains, it pours.

Burlington, Vermont so far has had less rain than right up along the Canadian border. The Queen City has had 5.14 inches as of last midnight. That doesn't place October in the top 10 wettest, but if the next storm comes early enough, on October 31, it could put this month in that top ten list.

The storminess here and the fires are related meteorologically. And climate change might have a hand in it.  When the Arctic is warm, it does seem the jet stream has more and bigger northward bulges and southward dips. And those patterns seem to get stuck.

This month, an enormous northward bulge in the jet stream has kept Alaska very toasty, at least by their standards.  What goes up must come down. So there's been a corresponding major dip in the jet stream into the Rockies and western Plains.

Which is why they've had some odd wintry cold fronts and snowstorms out in that neck of the woods.

The cold in the Rockies and the warmth in California has increased the pressure gradient between the West Coast warmth and Rockies cold.  Bigger pressure gradients mean more wind, which is in part why these periods of very gusty, dry downslope winds have brought fires to California.

That dip in the jet stream means there's a corresponding northward bulge further east, off the East Coast.  Which puts us Vermonters in a flow that comes from the southwest.  This arrangement allows storms to pull lots of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, so it rains hard.

Yet one more storm is coming along, as I said on Halloween and November 1.  Details are still sketchy, but there could be heavy rains and strong winds in and around Vermont with this one. We'll keep an eye on it.

Meanwhile, California keeps burning. The biggest danger today shifts toward the southern part of the state, especially near and north of Los Angeles. Already early this morning, a roaring wildfire developed near the 405 and Getty Center. It was rapidly spreading, a few houses were already on fire and there were hasty evacuations going on.

So the day doesn't look good at all in that region

Some videos:

A grass fire trapped cars on Interstate 5 near Sacramento. Some people had to run for their lives as their cars caught fire. Others looked for an escape route as traffic jammed amid the smoke and embers.

Here's somebody on that Sacramento freeway as the wildfire closes in, directing traffic onto a dirt side road that would help them escape the fire. Chaotic!



A dangerous fire developed in Vallejo, California, but firefighters eventually, somehow got the pper hand on it.  Here's what it looked like for awhile:



A home burning during the Kincade fire. Watch to near the end as a tree explodes dramatically overhead: