California kicked off 2025 with some of the most devastating wildfires in the state’s history. Thousands have already lost their homes, dozens have been killed, and as of today the largest of the Los Angeles area fires is only 14% contained. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with meteorologist Anthony Edwards of the San Francisco Chronicle to learn more about what caused the fires, how climate change is making events like these more commonplace and inevitable than ever, and what we can all do to better prepare for them. Then, we take a few minutes to look at the burgeoning industry of amateur meteorology in the ski industry and the impact that the growth in untrained meteorological professionals is having on Edwards’s job, and on the field in general.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Anthony Edwards (AE) | 00:23 – In California, we just had two of the four most destructive wildfires in state history occur on the same day in January. I mean, these extremes are occurring all over the world, and we’re seeing destructive events accelerating.
Narrator | 00:38 – California kicked off 2025 with some of the most devastating wildfires in the state’s history. Thousands have already lost their homes, dozens have been killed. And as of today, the largest of the Los Angeles area Fires is only 14% contained this week on Sea Change Radio. We speak with meteorologist Anthony Edwards of the San Francisco Chronicle to learn more about what caused the fires, how climate change is, making events like these more commonplace and inevitable than ever, and what we can all do to better prepare for them. Then we take a few minutes to look at the burgeoning industry of amateur meteorology in the ski industry and the impact that the growth in untrained meteorological professionals is having on Edwards’ job and on the field in general.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:44 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Anthony Edwards, who’s a meteorologist and journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Anthony, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Anthony Edwards (AE) | 01:52 – Thank you, Alex. It’s good to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:54 – So you’re not just a meteorologist, you’re a journalist, which adds a little context to what consumers of weather news are trying to, consumers are always trying to connect the dots from seeing these scientific models of wind patterns and weather patterns, but then the real life effects of climate change and, and extreme weather like we’re seeing down in Los Angeles. Why don’t you first talk about some of the challenges that you have as a journalist and meteorologist trying to connect those dots, and then I want to dive a little bit more into the details of what’s going on in Los Angeles.
Anthony Edwards (AE) | 02:32 – Sure, yeah. Well, that’s a great question. I mean, in California here, typically, uh, I feel like sometimes we’re laughed at by other parts of the country, you know, and people in tornado alley, you know, they, they see these crazy thunderstorms and whatnot. But for a large portion of the year here in California, you know, we generally have pretty nice weather and to raise the alarm bells when things are really getting real. That’s the big challenge, right? Because when we do have extremes, I mean, we, we’ve seen this the past few years in California. Now we have crazy fires. We had the fourth largest wildfire in state history this summer up in Northern California, and now two of the four most destructive wildfires in state history are burning in Southern California right now. And, you know, we’ve seen flooding, extreme heat waves here too. So I think the challenging part is to tell people, you know, hey, things are getting real. Like it’s time to, to be ready to go if you need to evacuate your house, because a lot of people move to the state thinking, you know, oh, we’re all good. Like, this is heaven. But really this is a state of extremes as well.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:31 – So we certainly are seeing some extreme weather right now in Los Angeles. If you can summarize the Eaton and Palisades fires and how we got here and, and where you see things moving forward, that’d be great.
Anthony Edwards (AE) | 03:44 – Yeah, this was an event that, you know, it’s hard to say that you predicted some sort of catastrophe, but the events sort of leading up to it, the weather and climate, uh, set the stage for what happened down there last week. I mean, the past two winters were quite wet in California last February. Parts of Los Angeles recorded their wettest two day period, uh, in history, you know, more than 12 inches of, or nearly 12 inches of rain at UCLA in a two day span. Uh, I mean, that’s pretty incredible. And so when you have all of that precipitation that falls, you know, the vegetation grows in a response. You see it after a really wet winter. The grasses get really big here, even in the Bay Area, you kind of see that too down in la I mean, the grasses just take off. And then the summer was quite hot, more than four degrees above normal, I believe, from the May through October time period. And then, you know, we had one of the driest, uh, falls on record there, there has been less than an inch of rain in all of coastal southern California since October 1st. And so when you have that fuel buildup gets very dry, then all of a sudden, you know, we can have some big fires.
AW | 04:46 – So it was just that big deluge. And little did we know, that was pretty much the end of it. Yeah, there was no more precipitation after that.
AE | 04:52 – Yeah, I mean, they, they’ve not seen any significant rainfall since about April of last year. So I mean, we’re going on almost nine months now in some areas without significant rainfall. And so the landscape is just super dry. It looks like a desert down there. And they’re on the coast, so this is really unusual.
AW | 05:11 – What seemed really unusual to me was that the Pacific Palisades is this toney suburb in between like Santa Monica and Malibu with these grand estates. And I usually think of these wildfires as being out in the middle of nowhere. This is a pretty unusual fire in that it’s in a very highly populated area. How do these fires spread? Is it the houses are serving as a fuel as well, is that right?
AE | 05:41 – That’s right, yeah. So we call these wildland urban interface fires. So they start in the wildland, which you know, is in this case, uh, brush and grassland area, uh, just, you know, uphill from this community where thousands of people live and, you know, a fire sparks there. And suddenly when there’s strong winds, like we observed, uh, last Tuesday, you know, we were seeing gusts of 60 to 80 miles per hour up on the hills. In some instances above the Eaton Fire. There was a hundred mile per hour gust. And so when you have winds that strong and a fire starts, you know, whether it’s, uh, arson or, uh, you know, like somebody, you know, sparks their car, sparks in the hills or whatever, and then all of a sudden the, the fire’s coming for the community. And so suddenly it turns into a wildland fire, like a grassland fire, and then the fire’s burning house-to-house. And so the firefighting tactics suddenly change, you know, in a wildland area, the primary way to stop those fires is by dropping water and fire retardant and building a line so the fire can’t jump it. But when you have winds going that strong, you know, you’d have to, the embers can drift, you know, a mile or two downwind. And so with winds that strong, suddenly it gets into the urban area and it’s burning from house to house to house. And, you know, you can’t drop fire retardant and water when people are evacuating or it could kill somebody if, you know, tens of thousands of pounds fall on them, they’re going to die suddenly. So, it’s just almost impossible to stop these fires until the wind slowed down. And we’ve seen that time and time again with these sort of wildland urban interface fires.
AW | 07:17 – So the trees must have a big effect on that as well. I’m thinking of some of these major cities that we have in the southwest of America that are just as dry, if not drier than Los Angeles, but maybe they just don’t have the, the tree growth to spur on these fires like in Phoenix or Albuquerque or Oklahoma City, El Paso or Las Vegas. Why, why have we not heard about big intra urban wildfires in those areas? Is that because of the lack of trees or what?
AE | 07:44 – Well, I think that something to remember is that southern California is very prone to, to very strong winds during the fall, and actually winter in this case, typically the sort of Santa Ana wind events that are blowing from the land to the sea, this is very dry air. And by January, typically we have rain down in Los Angeles by this time, but the landscape is just as dry as it was in September, October, right now. So when you have these very dry winds, which the LA area is prone to during winter, and you haven’t seen any rain in ages, then you know, all of your vegetation’s dry the grass, the brush, the trees, and actually in some cases we’ve seen photos of trees standing completely, almost untouched. The canopy is still intact, but the houses are burned all the way around. So these fires were burning from house to house to house, and they weren’t even touching the canopy above. So it is pretty incredible to see some photos.
AW | 08:37 – So how much of that is the wind speed versus the wind direction? Like you talk about these land born winds. A few years ago here in San Francisco when we had really bad wildfire smoke, the whole city was shrouded and smoke because the winds shifted. They usually come from the Pacific and go west to east, but they shift. The Santa Ana winds are, are a, uh, east to west wind. Is that right?
AE | 09:03 – That’s right, yeah. So here in coastal California during summer, uh, the reason that we’re so temperate is because we have those sea breezes that pickup, and that’s caused because the inland area is so hot, the air rises, and then there needs to be something that to fill in that missing air. And so that is the pacific breeze. And so we’ll see that throughout the summer. But as soon as, you know, we get toward fall and winter, the land isn’t heating up quite as much inland. And actually we have storms that kind of sink toward Nevada, Arizona, and that whips the winds and pushes them in the other direction. So we have winds moving up and over the mountains and toward the city, and when air sinks, it warms and dries. And so suddenly we’re, you know, if there weren’t any fires, you would notice it still because your skin is really dry. It’s almost like you’re, you know, on top of a high mountain and it’s just super dry air.
AW | 10:48 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Anthony Edwards from the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s a meteorologist and a journalist. Anthony, can you speak to the criticism that we’ve heard from the Southern California fires in terms of water shortages? We’ve heard of dry reservoirs and hydrants not functioning, but there’s more to it than that. It seems like.
AE | 11:11 – That’s right. Let’s keep in mind that there were tens of thousands of homes burning, uh, during these fires. So think about just how much water would be needed to douse a single home burning. Right? Not many of us have witnessed a fire fight, but you can only imagine, you’re using just so much water to put out these fires and, and the systems just aren’t designed for, you know, putting out fires that are burning thousands or tens of thousands of homes simultaneously. So, I mean, if you go back in history, and even the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, there was an urban fire storm and the hydrants were running dry then. And we’ve seen this again in Chicago in the past too. All these, these firestorms that have happened in urban areas, the demand on the, the, the hydrants and the water system is so high that they can’t meet that demand. There’s not enough pressure. And so suddenly the hoses will run to a trickle and the firefighters don’t have any more water. So obviously that’s a big problem, but I don’t know if that’s ever one that we’re gonna be able to solve completely just because our water systems are just so outdated.
AW | 12:16 – Are there some water systems that can handle this elsewhere around the world? I mean, when you say they’re outdated, are there ones like in Amsterdam or Dubai that are much better, or, or is it an infrastructure issue, or is it just science that we can’t physically, we, that man has not created an, an urban water system that could fight mass amounts of concomitant fires.
AE | 12:40 – Sure. I mean, you’re using pumps and, and gravity for these sort of water systems, right? So I mean, Palisades up the, they pump the water up a hill into some reservoirs, and so the gravity assisted pulls it down. And so that’s the thing with any urban, you know, uh, like reservoirs you see here, even in the city of San Francisco, all of our reservoirs are up on top of hills. So then when you know the water demand goes up, then all it needs is gravity. So I think, you be talking about basically just building hills around the world to, to account for this or, or something. I mean, it’s, it’s a really interesting, uh, question that I think, I’m not probably the best suited to answer, but I would like to know myself too.
AW | 13:20 – So let’s take a step back and explain to our listeners your education. And you’re a young, up and coming meteorologist, a lot of meteorologists that I grew up watching did not get educated under the reality of climate change. You very much had that as an integral part of your education. And then you’ve also studied journalism so that you can put these events into context. Give us a snapshot of what modern education is like for a meteorologist versus what it might’ve been for your professors 20, 30 years ago.
AE | 13:58 – It’s hard to kind of imagine the, the world without these extremes for someone like me, which is, and be frightening for, somebody that’s like middle age to, to hear, right? I mean, we’re seeing this over and over again. So all I’ve grown up with is just seeing these disasters, accelerate around the world. So I, I think that really adds some perspective is, uh, to, to seeing what’s capable, like what our planet is now capable of doing to us because the way that we’ve altered the atmosphere, and for a lot of, I would say, maybe traditional meteorologists, I was once told in school, you know, never, never forecast, a record or an extreme, because the odds of it happening are, are just so low. You know, say you’re, it’s a July, a hot July day, and you’re the record, high temperature is 100 degrees. You would never be told to, to forecast a temperature of 102 degrees because, you know, that would just be silly. Like, the odds of that happening are so low. Our, our climatology, we have hundreds of years of records in some cases. Well, you know, it’s probably very unlikely that’s going to happen. Well, now we’re seeing these instances where we are setting records, you know, at a record pace, uh, not to use that term twice, but I think you, your perspective has to go beyond, uh, what you’ve experienced, right? It, the thing about these la fires, uh, for some people it, it’s hard to fathom the fact that tens of thousands of homes are burning, right? You would never imagine that sort of thing happening. Well, I mean, who would, right? It’s like that’s, we’ve never seen this before.
AW | 15:32 – And we’re seeing like the, what, these are the third and fourth biggest fires at the same time burning in California state history. And I think like six or seven of the 10 largest fires in California state history have been in the last decade alone.
AE | 15:45 – Yeah. I mean, these fires are, are getting bigger and they’re spreading faster. I interviewed a fire scientist at UC Merced in October. Uh, some new research, uh, that they published showed that they found a fourfold increase in wildfire growth rates in California over the past two decades. And so it doesn’t mean that winds are getting faster. What we’re seeing is that these winds are occurring over critically dry vegetation, such as this year, right? When we dry out our fuels, uh, during the summer because we’re getting, it’s getting so much hotter during the summer and then fall, we don’t see any rain, for months. Then all of a sudden when the strong winds do hit in November, December, January, uh, we see these fires just spreading faster and faster, as we saw with the Palisades and Eaton incidents. In some cases, you know, the embers were drifting two miles down wind. And we like to, as meteorologists and people that are educated about fire spread, there’s a typical rule of thumb that you use for wildfire spread is about a 10th, uh, sorry, 10% of the sustained wind speed is about how fast the fire would travel. So say you have a wind that’s blowing at 20 miles per hour sustained, then the fire would maybe move at two miles per hour. But that rule of thumb really breaks down as the wind speeds get faster and faster. So in some cases, winds were sustained at 50 miles per hour. And so the embers, if you use the typical rule of thumb, the fire front would be moving about five miles per hour. But these embers are drifting so far down wind in some cases, 10 miles per hour, maybe 20 miles per hour. That’s faster than people can walk or run. And so, uh, it’s unfortunate, but we, we saw, uh, a lot of deaths with these fires, and that was what you would kind of expect because people can’t outrun these sort of things if they don’t leave it just in time.
AW | 17:35 – You’ve never really known a world where these urgent threats are not a reality. You’ve never known a world where there’s not impending wildfire problems, hurricanes, impending doom…
AW | 17:49 – Impending doom. You’ve grown up in the era of impending doom, but I’m curious how some of your mentors have adjusted or not adjusted to this changing world.
AE | 18:01 – Yeah. Well, some people, you know, will have preconceived notions because of, you know, different things. Or maybe they want their perspective, their political perspective to be met…
AW | 18:13 – Be reinforced.
AE | 18:14 – Yeah, reinforced or, or whatever. But I, if you really open your eyes and just think for a second, right? Some of these professors, they’ve been on this planet for six, seven decades and you know, they’re still working. And if you really think, if you’re really denying that, you know, we’re not the world’s different than it was, uh, when you were in school like 50 years ago, uh, I mean, you’re just, uh, I don’t know what to say. I mean, you’re in the…
AW | 18:38 – Wrong profession.
AE | 18:39 – Yeah. You’re in the wrong profession. I mean, just the, the summer we saw two destructive hurricanes blow through the Tampa Bay area within a two week span. These were devastating hurricanes. That Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay race play, they’re not going to be able to play there because their roof just caved in. And like there was destruction everywhere, billions of dollars of destruction. And in California, we just had two of the four most destructive wildfires in state history occur on the same day in January. I mean, these extremes are occurring all over the world. And in our country too. We’ve seen this time and time again over the past few years, we’re seeing destructive events accelerating, and they are now encroaching on our urban areas, big cities like Los Angeles, that you would think, oh, maybe it’s a safe haven because you’re not living in the boonies or whatever. Tens of thousands of people just lost their homes. That’s going to resonate with the state for years, for decades. I mean, people are going to flee the state. They can’t get homeowners insurance. You can’t really get homeowners insurance in most of this country anymore because the way that these extremes are accelerating.
AW | 19:44 – Can’t get homeowners insurance or you can’t get like earthquake and fire protection.
AE | 19:47 – Oh, fire, sure, sure. Yeah. Like fire insurance. I mean, it’s just a huge problem. Now, the fallout from this is going to be incredible.
AW | 20:58 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to meteorologist and journalist Anthony Edwards from the San Francisco Chronicle. So Anthony, you were talking about in school you were taught not to predict records. It’s almost analogous to someone who’s trying to predict gambling odds. We like to think of our meteorologist as as fact-based, but there is a lot of guesswork involved. You try to take as much information, as many models as you can and then come to some kind of conclusion, but ultimately there is some guesswork involved.
AE | 21:32 – Yeah, I mean, leading up to this event, it was very clear that we were going to see incredibly strong wins in the Los Angeles region. And the most recent, the sort of proxy event that we had, it was 14 years ago in, I believe, was it December of 2011, there was a big windstorm that knocked over thousands of trees in the Pasadena area. And this event looked like it was going to unfold in a very similar way based on the weather maps and charts that we read and the way it was evolving. But the difference here was that we were entering sort of a drought in Southern California right now, they haven’t had significant rainfall in like, well over half year, nearly nine months in some areas. And we said, well, if we have this level, level of destruction on top of a just parched landscape, essentially just being so dry and the fact that millions of people are living in this area, we have power lines strung everywhere, uh, the odds are there not being a wildfire, next to none, right? I mean, it’s just people create sparks. There’s people that you know, want to cause terror by, you know, setting blazes out and in some cases, it’s just a freak accident too. But, you know, you can’t predict fire starts. You can’t predict a spark. But what you can predict is if there is a spark and a wildfire breaks out what might happen. And so that’s what the officials were warning of for days. The National Weather Service several days in advance warned that if a wildfire were to break out, it would be difficult to, impossible to contain. It would be moving at a such a rapid speed. And so they really were sending these warnings out days in advance telling people this is going to be a destructive event, whether or not there’s a wildfire just from the winds alone.
AW | 23:23 – But it’s so hard to get a populace to be reactive when it’s such a wide swath of area where that spark could potentially pop up.
AE | 23:33 – Mm-hmm . Yeah, I think that’s why, that’s why I think it’s important that people that do, you know, live in areas that are near hills or, or wooded areas, um, or even just grasslands, uh, know the, the risks that come with living in that area. You know, people in Altadena that live maybe a mile away from the hills maybe never would’ve thought that their home would’ve burned. But if you live in an area that’s prone to wildfires, it’s important to trim vegetation away from your house. You know, there’s some new laws that are being, uh, enforced in California now that people live in wildfire, risk zones can’t have any vegetation within five feet of their home. We are seeing these wildfires become just urban firestorms because houses are so flammable. If you trim the vegetation away from your house and you close up your gutters, you don’t have litter trapped in your, in your gutters, uh, that can really protect your home. We call this defensible space. And you know, we talk about adaptation and mitigation when it comes to climate change, right? Obviously, uh, a huge conversation is how do we, you know, sort of mitigate this, but we also have to adapt, right? Reality is the, the planet and the climate is changing faster than, than we are. Um, and so we need to stop the sort of extreme events from causing destruction. And so ways that you can do that are what I said. You know, trim vegetation away from your home, make sure your gutters are closed up. If you live in a wildfire prone area. Know the risks that come with living in that area and, you know, have a go-bag ready. Uh, the disasters that we are seeing, uh, you know, we can’t prevent disasters, right? We can’t stop earthquakes. We can’t stop tornadoes, but we can stop wildfires, uh, and we can stop the destruction that comes with wildfires if people are just aware of the risks that live that come with living in your area and you do the right things with your home and around your home.
AW | 25:42 – On a side note, I’m interested by the proliferation of amateur meteorologists who are springing up predicting snowfall, and some of them are very good and use the best data possible and are honing in on to a very granular degree saying, you know, this side of the mountain will get three inches. Well, the other side will get six. And, and it’s pretty remarkable – On The Snow, OpenSnow, all of these apps, and each one of them has a region with an amateur meteorologist who’s making a decent living, I assume, doing this. How does a professional meteorologist, a trained meteorologist, view this corner of the space?
AE | 26:24 – Sure. I mean, some people are quick to dismiss those without a degree, but I do think that when you live in a climate for so long, right? You kind of have a sixth sense in, in a way, um, just like people that, you know, grew up in San Francisco and, you know, our, our sort of infamous microclimates, someone that, you know, maybe lives in in the Richmond could tell you, oh, based on this one wind pattern, like, I know that the sun’s going to come out in 90 minutes. Well, you could say the same thing about living up in the mountains where there’s, you know, a lot of snow up in the Sierra Nevada. And so I think it’s really cool that these people are kind of aware that, okay, you know, if the wind direction changes by five or 10 degrees, then the amount of snow that I can expect in my area might be twice as much as if there was a southwest wind as opposed to a northwest wind. So that sort of stuff is really cool. If you can interpret maps the right way and, and you train yourself to be sort of aware of the patterns in your area, uh, yeah, you can sort of predict the weather as well. So that’s really cool.
AW | 27:29 – And is it useful for meteorologists like yourselves who are looking at a wider map to utilize these boots on the ground, so to speak?
AE | 27:37 – Oh, entirely. I mean, California is a massive state, right? I can’t be that familiar with every single region of this state like the back of my hand, but these guys, you know, they’ve lived there for decades, so it’s really cool. I mean, I respect those people a lot and I’m a, you know, consumer of those sort of regional, uh, forecasts as well, whether it’s surfing, skiing or whatnot. So it’s really cool.
AW | 27:58 – Anthony Edwards, thanks for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
AE | 28:02 – Thank you for having me. Alex.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Boogaloo Joe Jones, Bad Religion and Pete Townsend. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
