What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?

加州的圣安娜风是什么?

Short Wave

科学

2025-01-10

10 分钟
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Over 29,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area are on fire right now. The fires emerged after the Santa Ana winds swept into the Los Angeles area Tuesday. The largest is the Palisades fire, which is quickly burning through the Pacific Palisades and Malibu communities. It's one of four ongoing critical fires — only one of which is partially contained. Ahead of the windy week, a Red Flag Warning was issued for an increased fire risk due to the strong winds, low humidity and higher temperature. Today, we dig into the Santa Ana winds: What they are and how they combined with other factors to create conditions for the most destructive fire in Los Angeles' history. Questions, story ideas or want us to dig more into the science underpinning natural disasters? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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  • You're listening to Short Wave from npr.

  • Hey, short wavers.

  • Emily Kwong here.

  • So you may have been hearing about how the wildfires in Los Angeles are connected to the Santa Ana winds.

  • These winds blow every year, but meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles anticipated this week's windstorm would, quote, likely be the most destructive in over a decade.

  • The winds picked up Tuesday morning.

  • It is completely hazy, dark, sparking several fires across LA County.

  • We've seen palm trees on fire.

  • We've seen especially in canyon slopes where the wind dropped the humidity, basically the.

  • Moisture and rain gets squeezed out of these systems right on those same slopes where the Santa Ana winds blow the hardest.

  • We talked to Alexander Gershonov about this.

  • He's a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

  • And he says that last winter was really wet and vegetation flourished, but this year the LA area has received very little rain for months.

  • Specifically in that region where the wildfires are right now, you have a lot of vegetation dry and ready to burn and that's exactly where you get the strongest Santa Ana wind.