weird summer coming up....

As the third atmospheric river of the week is pounding WinSol right now, I noticed the first hurricane developing off the Florida coast.  
and that's two weeks before the official start of the hurricane season (June 1). 


After a record setting, strong el Nino winter, are we in for a normal summer?  I think not.  There are a lot of signs that this could be a somewhat cooler and maybe not so dry summer.  Yeah! 

Three years ago we had a similar summer - a bit of rain every month and mild temperatures.  

Of course all the talking heads are warning of a heightened fire season - you know the usual fear mongering:  because of the wet winter there will be SO much vegetation that'll dry out quickly and become fuel for large wildfires.  As opposed to a dry winter, where the fear mongers claim that the lack of water makes everything more dry and THAT becomes fuel for large wildfires.  Take you pick of which fear mongers you want to believe.  I shrug off both and get ready for fire season the same way each year:  increase defensible space, rake and burn all the leaves, clean up all combustibles around the house and watch the Cal Fire incident website daily.

As the saying goes:  it's always fire season in California.  Has been for hundreds of years and always will be.  There's just more people now - way more peeps!

Climate change? 
Is this global warming,  who knows...   Localized weather has too many variables, even for our super computers and large brains to figure out.
I'll endorse this statement by

“Warming has been so extreme in California over the last century that every summer is hot and dry enough to support fire, no matter how wet this past winter was,” said Williams.

(Park Williams, bio-climatologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)