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This is where the weather starts.
Florida seems to be getting hit from all sides. The ocean is so hot that people can’t cool off in it. Insurers are pulling out of the state. The governor is in a knockout fight with both Disney and Donald Trump. Dust carried all the way from the Saharan Desert is in the air above Floridians’ heads.
Actually, that last one’s fine. It is, in fact, normal. The dust that’s coming to the state now is part of a regular cycle called the Saharan Air Layer that, as my colleague Robinson Meyer recently wrote, has been delayed this summer, contributing to the weirdly hot waters off Florida. But it’s not just the dust: to understand what the summer in Florida — and the Southeast at large — is going to look like, we have to turn to West Africa.
Let’s start with the dust. The dust storms that make up the Saharan Air Layer start out in (surprise!) the Sahara desert and can be as big as the lower 48 states before they weaken as they move across the ocean. When they hit Florida they make the air about a mile above the ground extremely hot and dry, while the air below remains soupy and humid. That hot, dry air a mile up is essentially a cloud-killer: any potential hurricanes would dissipate in those conditions, but so do the thunderstorms that would otherwise bring some cooling rain to the state.
For the most part, the dust isn’t anything to worry about, said Jason Dunion, a meteorologist and field program director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), though there might be a dip in air quality that people in sensitive groups — anyone with a lung condition like asthma, or senior citizens — should watch out for. The current dust storm will move on in a few days, and another will arrive a few days later to take its place. Unfortunately, the dust won’t quite do much in terms of cooling down the ocean.
“The world’s oceans are out of balance from where they’ve been for the last 125,000 years,” Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, told me. “We’re seeing warming in the global oceans that is really quite bonkers.”
Exactly what is causing the ocean to warm — as in the literal physical effects behind that warming — will no doubt be the subject of many papers to come, Kirtman said, but there’s little doubt that anthropogenic climate change is the root cause.
That warmer water has many effects, the first being that the water off Florida is essentially now a hot tub, so the ocean breeze blowing into cities like Miami doesn’t have the cooling effect it usually does. That raises the heat index, putting people at risk of heat stroke. Higher ocean temperatures are also putting marine life — particularly coral reefs, which support thousands of sea creatures — in danger, as The New York Timesreported this week.
Then there’s the way warmer oceans impact hurricanes. This year marked the start of an El Niño, the weather pattern that usually brings less intense hurricane seasons. But, Kirtman told me, “the Atlantic is so flipping warm that the El Nino effect might not give us a weaker hurricane season.”
This is where we return, again, to West Africa. The dust, the hurricanes, the ocean temperatures: all of these are deeply, intricately connected.
“The hurricane nursery for the Atlantic is just south of the Sahara,” said Dunion “More than half the named storms we get in the Atlantic come from that nursery. So it’s a really important place to look at.”
Many hurricanes are born right off the coast of West Africa, between the Sahara and an area known as the Sahel. The hot air from the Sahara collides with colder air caused by storms in the Sahel, creating what Dunion called “tropical waves” that ripple outwards. These are the seedlings of hurricanes.
A warmer ocean sees more evaporation, which moves water vapor up through the atmosphere and usually intensifies hurricanes. This is true throughout their life cycle, and the waters off Western Africa, while not quite as warm as they are near Florida, are also much warmer than normal — in the high 70s or low 80s Fahrenheit, Dunion told me, and “80 degrees is that magic number where once we get to that temperature it's very conducive for exchanging energy from the ocean to the atmosphere.”
That heat means the hurricane nursery below the Sahara Desert could produce some especially strong storms, especially once the dust storms stop. “There’s a switch point in mid-August where the dust outbreaks start to subside.” Dunion said. “That may help open a window to make the environment much more juicy to support some of these storms,”
So the hurricanes could start especially strong, and will grow even stronger when they bump into the warm waters off the coast of Florida. Together, that could negate the effects of the El Niño; NOAA has predicted a near-normal hurricane season for this year, with somewhere in the range of 12 to 17 storms, in part because of the warmer oceans offsetting the El Niño.
That would be striking: if NOAA’s predictions hold, we’ll be in for a summer defined by the worst effects of an El Niño, like searing heat, without any of the hurricane-mitigating benefits. But, Dunion told me, the weather is ever-shifting and there are still many unknowns.
“What we don’t know is what the future is going to look like in the next month,” he said. “Will these dust outbreaks kind of ramp up really quickly? Will the sea surface temperatures settle out? That part is still a mystery. We can monitor it, but predicting exactly how it will play out is the humbling part of being a meteorologist.”
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.