So the fuels in that area are extremely dense. “If anything does start on the other side of 101, the west side,” he said Sunday morning, “that area hasn’t seen any fire history since the 1940s. (Courtesy of Craig Clements/SJSU Fire Weather Research Laboratory)Īnd any new spot fire would have the same rapid rate of spreading as the main fire does, said Steve Volmer, Cal Fire’s chief fire behavior analyst, and the same potential for spotting a mile or more further on. This new mobile radar allows scientists with SJSU's Fire Weather Research lab to collect information they've never had before, to help learn how fires spot. That’s one reason county officials said they issued evacuation warnings and orders well ahead of the advancing fire Cal Fire’s models of the fire behavior predicted the Kincade Fire could spot more than a mile from the existing front. “We were observing flame heights of hundreds and hundreds of feet,” he said. “Very strong, and the fire behavior was very extreme.”Ĭlements and his team were up near Healdsburg Sunday morning, after a night when winds hit the fire at speeds above 75 miles per hour.

“This is extreme wind,” said Craig Clements, director of San José State University's Fire Weather Research Laboratory. Yet it was one of the most important questions facing Sonoma County officials over the weekend, given the extraordinary winds meteorologists predicted would bear down on the Kincade Fire.

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