It’s not just climate change that’s intensifying warming in Southern California. As our cities become more populous and denser with buildings, vehicles, and roads, they capture and reflect more of the sun’s heat, and that heat is increasingly dissipating the morning fog and low clouds that shade coastal Southern California in the summer. A scientific study released last week revealed that clouds in coastal areas have “declined significantly” since the 1970s in the most urbanized areas.
“Cloud cover is plummeting in southern coastal California,” said Park Williams, a climatologist and former graduate student and researcher at UC Santa Barbara. “And as the clouds decrease, that increases the chances of bigger and more intense fires.”
Eric Boldt, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service station in Oxnard, said that the findings made a lot of sense, based on his years of experience observing weather in Southern California. “I fully think this is accurate,” he said. “If you heat up the land, you’re going to burn off clouds sooner in the morning.”