The Zaca fire has continued to spread in hot and dry and occasionally windy conditions in Santa Barbara County and has now burned about 140,000 acres. Dense smoke, and some localized falling ash, is widespread across the coastal areas as well as the southern San Joaquin Valley. Hot and dry conditions will moderate only slightly over the next few days before intensifying fire behavior again after the weekend. Firefighters are currently having a difficult time holding many of the containment lines on the N and E sides of the fire, and there is a moderate chance that the fire will become established outside of these lines in the coming days. Stay tuned…this fire’s not anywhere near containment yet…

 An interesting series of developments are currently taking place in the tropical Atlantic that may impact our weather in the 7-12 day period. That’s right, I said the tropical Atlantic. Hurricane Dean, now approaching catergory three strength in the Carribbean, is expected to pummel Jamaica and the Cayman Islands as a monster cat. 4 or cat. 5 storm over the next 3 days. The eventual track of the system after that is very uncertain at this time, and will be highly dependent on the development of a low pressure area that may steer the storm north between the Yucatan Peninsula and just west of Cuba, allowing the storm to maintain cat. 4 strength or higher as it emerges into the Gulf of Mexico. Currently, there is about a 50% chance that the hurricane will strike the central or southern Texas coast as a major hurricane, with smaller chances of the storm deviating either north or south of this path. If the storm maintains strength as at least a cat. 3 upon landfall in Texas or N. Mexico, there will probably be quite a bit of remnant moisture that makes it across continental Mexico and into the Gulf of California area. There may even be a center of circulation left after the usually “fatal” trek of Mexico’s high mountain ranges. The GFS is currently indicating at least a somewhat favorable pattern for some of the this remnant moisture to advect in to the SW and possibly CA. In fact, even if remnant moisture from Dean does not make it this far west, southerly flow may be strong enough to initiate a more traditional monsoonal surge event. Stay tuned…