How This Year’s Fire Season Could Pan Out

There’s no doubt about it: The 2024 wildfire season in California has begun.

Propelled by dry and windy weather, more than two dozen fires have erupted across the state in the past week, including the two biggest blazes of the year so far — the Post fire northwest of Los Angeles and the Sites fire in Colusa County, northwest of Sacramento, which had grown to more than 19,000 acres as of Wednesday evening and was only 10 percent contained.

“We have entered fire season unambiguously,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at U.C.L.A., said in an online briefing. “I think we’re going to see a greatly increased level of fire activity this year, compared to the last two years.”

After two rainy winters in a row, there is more grass and vegetation than usual available to burn, Swain said. And though the land isn’t unusually parched yet, he said, it’s likely to become dangerously dry in the next few months, setting the stage for extreme and difficult-to-control fires.

(Fire season is looking worrisome elsewhere in the West as well. Two wildfires in southern New Mexico were burning out of control Wednesday evening, scorching more than 23,000 acres and prompting the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes.)

In California, 2022 and 2023 were mild fire years, for a welcome change. Wildland fires burned roughly 325,000 acres and damaged 70 buildings across the state in 2023; two years earlier, the acreage figure was nearly eight times as high — more than 2.5 million in all — and 3,500 structures were damaged.

California was lucky last year, with an exceptionally wet winter followed by an unusually cool summer. Then the remnants of Hurricane Hilary dumped so much rain on Southern California in August that it effectively ended the fire season when it ordinarily would be peaking.