Name: Santa Ana winds kick up in California after rainy start to winter
Uploaded: 2026-01-08T02:23:43.115Z
Duration: 1 min 52 s
Description: One year after devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County, windy conditions are back, but with extremely different weather conditions on the West Coast.

One year after devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County, windy conditions are back, but with extremely different weather conditions on the West Coast.

California

Santa Ana winds have returned to California, but conditions are less hazardous than previous events due to significant rainfall and snow accumulation over the winter. Los Angeles and San Diego have experienced heavy rain, resulting in damp soil and increased moisture in vegetation, which has lowered wildfire risk but raised the possibility of trees being uprooted.

Downtown Los Angeles has already surpassed its typical wet season rainfall, and the southern Sierra snowpack is above average. Reservoirs are running well above normal levels, and additional precipitation is expected to further improve water supplies and snow deficits in the region. The Northwest is also seeing heavy snow and blizzard conditions, with significant accumulations at mountain passes.

Santa Ana winds kick up in California after rainy start to winter

It has been one year now since the devastating wildfires tore through parts of Los Angeles County. Los Angeles County is home to 10 million people. It's the most populated individual county in the nation, and this was a tremendously dangerous, volatile setup. And again, it impacted so many communities and homes in Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and life has never been the same for so many families here. Well, it's been a year, and now we have another Santa Ana wind event, but this one, way more manageable than that one. In this case, we've had so much recent rain, and flooding even, in places like San Diego and Los Angeles, that the ground is still fairly damp, and there's a lot of moisture within the vegetation, so there's a risk of a few trees perhaps uprooting because of the recent water-logged ground. And this Santa Ana wind event will continue into Friday with an offshore wind. Wind advisories continue for some. We've been so wet out there. We've had 14 inches of rain in downtown L.A. since October 1st. Typically, if you go from October 1st to the end of March, the entire wet season, we get 13 inches. So we have a surplus, even if we didn't see any more rain for the next couple of months. We've also seen now a surplus of snow in the southern Sierra. At least the snowfall to date, we're at 114% of average, so a 14% surplus there. Still 11% below average for the central, and about 32% below average for the northern Sierra. But we're going to chip away at that deficit with a pretty good pattern continuing. Reservoir levels running real high here, 102 to 154% of average. That's a good surplus to have. And in the northwest, we've got more rain, more mountain snow, even a blizzard for some, as very heavy snow continues. We're looking at 3 to 5 feet of snow at Stevens Pass, and more than 2 feet at Snoqualmie Pass. The snow builds in Alaska, too.

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