Worried Wednesday Fire?

[Pork Rind]

Morning All,

Our fearless leader will no doubt be along shortly to do his regular excellent job of summarizing the aviation forecasts and satellite heat maps, but I'll kick this off with an early view of the beginnings of today's aerial assault. 

Looks like we have three aircraft over the fire area right now, the Bronco and the Rockwell Commander that operate as spotters (and the Bronco may be doing spot drops as well) and the first helicopter bomber of the day. 

My wife tells me that the wind forecast is looking bad for tomorrow and Friday evenings, so it seems critical to me that they get a handle on the fire that I'm hearing is burning in Romero Canyon.

My wife is apparently also headed back to the rose farm she helps manage in the foothills above Carp. I heard that the fire burned down to their property line on three sides and that the farm itself ultimately didn't burn thanks to the hard hard work of an all-female prison gang of firefighters. I have poor video of crews on the farm setting backfires last night, but unless someone claims to enjoy watching near-black footage, I'll hold off on posting that. 

[Pork Rind]

Note the dotted lines and unusually sharp angled turns on the track posted above. That's mostly due to the fact that my antenna is too low to 'see' over the ridgelines when those guys cross over and drop low. The software is doing its best to connect the dots so to speak, but there's only so much it can do...

Track here...

http://184.189.223.251:8080

[Pork Rind]

...and last but not least, here are two other tracking sites that may or may not have better detail. For technical reasons to boring to elaborate on here, there will be cases where certain aircraft only appear one or two of the three possible sites. I've got all three open all the time 'cause I'm that way...

My site, tracking ADS-B 1090ES and 978UAT signals as well as aircraft without ADS-B capabilities but with Mode S transponders

http://184.189.223.251:8080

ADSBExchange, an aggregator of feeds

https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html

The Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club feed, with the main antenna on Santa Ynez peak

http://vrs.earthspot.net:8080/VirtualRadar/desktop.html

[Pork Rind]

I see two C-130s over the fire area, N130FF, a private fire bomber that's been in the area for a while now and MAFFS4, an Air Force plane out of Pt. Mugu. Not sure what the Air Force C-130 is up to, but it clearly loitered over the fire area for a while...

[SBitz]

Kudos and warm thanks to PR for kicking off today's posts! I've been taking care of myriad things that came up while also keeping one eye on the fire. So far it's looking very good and still improving, but potential wind events are the big worry. In that regard, my impression is that fire crews are trying to get it knocked down ASAP (going flat out/pedal to metal/all-in, etc.). For example, the central "Salvar" temporary staging area that helicopter air attack has used in many prior fires has been activated. It's the one at the end of the Salvar Bridge (bridge to nowhere) over Hwy.154 just North of Foothill. An hour or so ago we started seeing a hornet nest of helicopters lining up there to haul what looks like PhosChek all the way back to the Montecito area. As PR reported, they're also attacking it from several places on the East side of the fire including still in Ventura County. I'm going to go offline again after posting this to get some photos, but first here's an overview of all IR satellite fire detection center points 0-6 hours old over the whole active area, including FRP (heat) colors. As you can see, there are fewer than in the past few days and the colors other than red show they're either small detections or not very hot. Again, these are the centers of detections from various sats with varying accuracy so some are (erroneously) detecting the same fire in different locations (thus the number of detections is almost certainly less than the number of dots).

[Pork Rind]

Here's a fun image that sadly I have to post without a lot of context. 

N130FF, MAFFS4 and MAFFS6 are all C-130s circling over the north side of San Marcos Pass. I wish that I could be there to see that, and that I had any idea what they were doing that far to the west. 

[Pork Rind]

...and here's a track showing one particular helicopter traveling back and forth between the Salvar staging area and the fire zone. The helicopters appear to be hammering the canyon one west of Romero.

[SBitz]

Here's what the helicopter assault is targeting. This long zoom to the East from 101@154 is way tweaked up in contrast and color so you can hopefully make out at least three relatively small smoke plumes. Ignore the near ridge at the bottom where there's no smoke much less flame, just weird effects of over-tweaking.

[Section Make8R]

quick edit to add that ridge above is slightly NNE of my location, you can see active flames on it. Could be just above Buena Vista Drainage, close to Park Lane.  Real thick stuff.   Verysteep rocky ridge is burning straight up.   Lots of planes etc....but they are letting that are burn, mostly heading over to Romero/Toro area I would assume

Thanks for this link.....hard to keep up with so much traffic there.  Multiple planes and copters doing runs, big 747 just can through (I think)  

 winds have cleared air enough to see fire has burnt all the Romero Canyon drainage to the top.  Probably the area I saw burn last night at 5pm or so when I posted about the massive flames.

  I feel the crews and pilots are trying real hard to knock it back enough so if/when north winds come, they will have abit of breathing space.

Fire still marching slowly west up some very steep faces. Probably look crazy again after dark......

[SBitz]

Here's the first helicopter I heard and saw at Salvar today, snapped with a long zoom from 101@154. I'm calling it Old Yeller even though I've not looked it up (might be new for all I know). Markings are N613CK Croman 103. It hovered dancing in the gusts to keep the bucket motionless while ground crews hustled a load into the bucket. Like watching an Indy pit crew. Then I snapped it zooming off to cool the flames.

[Section Make8R]

On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 2:46:54 PM UTC-8, Section Make8R wrote:

 another edit.....camera failure!!!!  oh well....fire is making a run up the ridge right now to the top, gonna get smoky.   I  saw Old Yeller swing by and drop its load about an hour ago into the lower Romero area, which is out of my view.

Current winds are slightly west on the fire face, but still down here.  ok gotta go get busy

 

  

 

quick edit to add that ridge above is slightly NNE of my location, you can see active flames on it. Could be just above Buena Vista Drainage, close to Park Lane.  Real thick stuff.   Verysteep rocky ridge is burning straight up.   Lots of planes etc....

[SBitz]

I've been taking extra time to minimize file size of posts, in case people with limited net access are trying to follow this. My heart goes out to all of you evacuated to shelters or living out of vehicles. Hope you'll forgive me posting this long zoom larger 900 pixel closeup of Old Yeller. You can make out the pilot, and watching the skill and concentration I knew he was using to fly so well on our behalf. Thank you pilots and all the thousands of fire fighters, support staff and volunteers!

[SBitz]

For anyone wondering about visibility right now, here (101@154) it's thin and even white haze with almost no smoke smell. In fact, after getting these pix my wife admonished me for not wearing a mask. This is looking toward the Northwest, and only delicately tweaked (especially compared with that one of the plumes!).

[SBitz]

Here's the 2:30pm visible sat, with brightness tweaked up so you can see the smoke plume. There's been a new flare up in the TJ (Mexico) area, but the smoke from it doesn't look bad. Aside from that it seems we have the regional fire air resources pretty much to ourselves, which is great news given the potential for adverse winds in a while.

[SBitz]

Here's the 2:30pm low-res GOES IR fire detection sat.

[SBitz]

Hunches: Looking at the aviation wind forecast my sense is the surface wind on SB County upper South facing slopes will soon start shifting from SW to S. This low-res national forecast shows it gradually getting stronger, peaking about 1am and easing up around 5am. It never goes above 18mph over land, but comes down to the water well offshore in the wee hours at up to 24mph. Looks like a mild "Sundowner" but my guess is the downslope wind probably won't come below 1,000' above sea level or so over the coast. That's what saved our lower foothills in the Jesusita Fire, when a cool moist sea breeze was going North below the hot smoke and ash headed South over our heads. More good news is that it isn't predominantly SW or W as a few days ago, which may keep the fire from leaping to the West into new fuel. Up at 3,000 feet where the surface forecast at the mountains meets the air just above the mountains it's stronger of course. That peaks about 3am, is weaker with some SW component over the Eastern part of SB County coast, and looks like this.

[SBitz]

3pm GOES low-res fire sat:

[SBitz]

A herd of rhinos is called a crash, so would the sky full of helicopters right now be a flutter, buzz, whop...? Anyway I'm also seeing two spotter planes and two jets at the moment, one a DC9 that just dropped, headed back to Santa Maria. The other is a BAe 146 200 that can do amazing things in tight quarters. It looks like this on the feed PR mentioned that's built and shared by the SBARC (ham radio volunteers).

[SBitz]

Broadcast Peak to the East at 4pm, looking smug in its blue sky and fireproof Sherpa scorched terrain. Seriously tho, we owe so much to all the volunteers who provide this stuff! Most of them are paid government employees who do this at their own time and expense.

[SBitz]

KEYT 3 is live waiting to cover a public info meeting that's about to start.

[SBitz]

My wife just looked over and smiled quietly with a raised eyebrow when I finally showed her this latest (3pm) Air Quality report. She loves being right (I should've worn the mask outside).

[topix]

Here are some updates from the community briefing held 4-5pm 12/13/17

CHP captain: 154 will be shut down from 5am-9am each day to move equipment in and out of the area (they started doing this today, Wed, and plan to continue for the next few days).  Also, as PR, SBitz and others have suspected/documented, there is a staging area by the 154/Foothill where 300 (of the nearly 8000 personnel) are helping to get fire retardant onto the lines.

Edison rep: Transmission lines are still threatened; however, at this time there are NO customers without power because of the fire.  Edison asks that we continue to conserve, as to reduce strain on system. Also, all planned maintenance outages have been cancelled through this Sunday.

Fire chief:  Mandatory and voluntary evacuations have been lifted for portions of Santa Barbara County for the area from US-101 to the ocean, from Santa Claus Ln at Padaro Rd. east to Rincon Beach Park. http://www.fire.ca.gov/current_incidents/incidentdetails/Index/1922

I will post more in a moment about the strategic plan for the fire and details on the fire behavior.

[topix]

During the community meeting today at 4pm, a fire behavior expert described why this fire has been outside the norm.  The dryness of the fuel bed is unprecedented.  He showed this slide (screen shot below) of the Energy Release Component (ERC), which is for all practical purposes a measure of fire potential [for the nerds, it is a composite measure of potential fire intensity based on the levels of moisture in dead and live fuel. For more details on these measures, see https://ticc.tamu.edu/Documents/PredictiveServices/Fuels/ERC_fact_sheet.pdf]

[Edited version]

The screenshot shows the ERC in our area since the sensor was installed in 2003. (I have done my best to transcribe this info but am not an expert. If you are, feel free to provide corrections.)
•The DASHED jagged line is 2017. When the fire started, we were at an ERC of 62.  As of today, we are at 106. Which is not only record setting for fire potential (we’re in the top 1% ) but also the rate at which the fire conditions have become drier.

For reference:
•Topmost straight line (97th percentile): only 3% of days (2003-present) had an ERC above 101
•Lower straight line (90th percentile): only 10% of days (2003-present) had an ERC above approx. 85
•The top jagged line (red) is the maximum ERC (2003-present) for this time of year (Sept – Dec are shown)
•The middle jagged line (gray) is the average ERC (2003-present)
•The bottom jagged line (blue) is the minimum ERC (2003-present)

[SBitz]

We got a chance to snap some aerial pix of the fire at 6pm. I've just sent one to Edhat, though I don't know if they've been able to post it yet. I'm still going thru them looking for the few that are least blurry due to low light and lots of motion in flight. Here's one that gives context of where the active burning was then. I might have some zoom views for a better look, and after posting the best I'll try to figure out landmarks. If anyone can point some out, please do.

[topix]

The fire chief discussed the fire strategy (during the community meeting today at 4pm) and noted the following:

•The fire is moving 0.5-1 mile/day (westward) across the front country.

•At the very northern edge, the fire is tying into the Zaca burn scar.  That is good news.  The Zaca area fuels are lighter and are slowing down the fire.  However, there is more growth in other burn scars (Jesusita and Tea) because of marine layer moisture over the years and those will not work as well to slow down or cool the fire.

•The fire strategy to protect the foothills above SB and Montecito has several contingency plans, and the contingency plans have contingency plans. The first strategy is to hold the fire in place.  If that fails, let the fire progress west and north, but hold the bottom edge (CORRECTION: Mountain Road). If that fails, conduct firing operations to pre-emptively burn off the fuel between Gibralter Canyon and the top and bottom of the front slope.  At the same time, cut hand lines to reinforce the bottom line and lay out fire hose for putting out any fires that jump the line.  Finally, if the fire conditions prevent the success of these prior options, then the emergency plan is to have 400 fire engines staged along 154 and force the fire towards Windy Gap.

•Prescriptive burns will be reviewed by all experts before attempting.  For now, heli recon has been conducted to evaluate the option of strategically burning areas in advance of the fire (that might explain some of the flight patterns others noted).  The team is keenly aware of the risks:

•Unprecedented low humidity values (one spot in Montecito was at 1% humidity today.  That is not a typo.)

•North end has not burned for over a century or at best not since the 1932 Matilija fire.

•The western fire edge is in Romero Canyon, which also burned in 1971 and claimed the lives of 4 firefighters.

[SBitz]

topix wrote:

During the community meeting today at 4pm,

Thank you SO much, Topix!! I was going thru pix when my wife exclaimed aloud about how informative your posts are so I took a moment to read, and decided to edit your helpful snap of the ERC chart and insert it into your post. I hope this is ok, and that you'll let me know if you'd prefer for me to refrain in future. Great to see more contributions from helpful people like you, PR, SM8R and the others. Hope more of you reading these topics will chime in with any info you believe will be informative. :)

[topix]

And finally, here's the weather impact for the next three days according to the fire chief (from today's 4pm briefing)

The most unpredictable period for the fire fighters and their plan is Friday night to Saturday am. There is a cold front moving through, but it is dry.  This will introduce north winds into the range (slight sundowner effect).  Although the cold barrier is not carrying moisture, it does help to hold the line by bringing down the fire temp.  However, the risk is that the winds from the north might line up and push down the slope.

After Saturday morning, they expect a return of moderate Santa Ana winds and a similar (relatively slow moving) pattern as we had earlier this week.

[SBitz]

Back to looking for unblurred aerial pix from 6pm, this one shows the East end of Carp down to Ventura. The red glow there is probably most or all just city lights thru smoke. Speaking of which, we were above almost all the smoke and it was delightful to breathe cool fresh air sans masks.

[SBitz]

Forgot to mention that the cool distant moonrise glow of blue skies with high clouds was only seen by the extreme low light camera setting - it was all black to us. I'm frankly amazed at how this next one came out, given that it's zoomed a fair amount. I've tweaked the brightness up and color down some in case it helps anyone ID locations.

[topix]

Editing welcome!  And glad you found it helpful. Likewise, your forum has often had more up-to-date (and often unique) info than I can find anywhere else incl. all official pages and the otherwise wonderful edhat.

[Section Make8R]

I assume you are a pilot?....(duh)  anyways, I believe that the lowest portion of flame in your shot, the downward facing arrowhead or wedge, is the section of Romero/Toro which burned quite far down into the foothills.  It looks as though its right off the downtown but I think thats due to the angle.

Saw and ID the big MD80 jet coming in for a drop.

Lots of discussion of a back burn around Gibraltor Rd. perhaps trying to link Zaca Tea and other burned areas.  You can see quite a few vehicles up on Camino Cielo right now at 8:38...some major flare ups on the ridges above Buena Vista area, which is one canyon (or so) to the east of San Ysidro canyon. I think San Ysidro canyon wraps around Montecito peak, a cone shaped peak which sits straight up from Cold Springs.....

Heres a site someone posted over at Weather West, has some Ok tools...good resolution.

  https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=34.45238,-119.71254&z=11&b=hyb&a=modis_mp,wxd_wspd-01

[SBitz]

I've been offline a while orienteering on pix. Here's a wide view that I think is marked correctly. Please add comments if you can ID other stuff. The lens differs vastly from gMaps, but the layout looks a little like this gMaps sat view link.

[Section Make8R]

edit to add:  thanx topix for your post!!!  I am having a bit of difficulty sorting the posting mechs of Google, so I tend to get lost here.  I like the PHBB formats a bit more. 

anyways, caught the portion of the news conference which had the fuels expert  mentioned in your graph post. He was really concise and clear, as many of the news anchors are just speakers, and not scientists.  Your post also clear and concise!!!  Thanx!!!!  (I ramble all over and have to edit edit edit)

On Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 8:52:07 PM UTC-8, Section Make8R wrote:

I assume you are a pilot?....(duh)  anyways, I believe that the lowest portion of flame in your shot, the downward facing arrowhead or wedge, is the section of Romero/Toro which burned quite far down into the foothills.  It looks as though its right off the downtown but I think thats due to the angle.

Saw and ID'd the big MD80 jet coming in for a drop. Impressive. 

[SBitz]

This is probably the last passable pic I got, taken about 6:11pm from a little lower with longer zoom (thus the lights that don't look like dots). I think there are a few more, and possibly better pix to look at and maybe post still.

[SBitz]

This one's pretty good, and the burning at the right seems to match up with the video we saw earlier on KEYT.

[SBitz]

Last and possibly best of the batch, this zoom is pretty crisp so I've tried to bring out some detail. Someone who knows that area well could probably figure out where those homes are, nearest the flames. Wonder what the story is about that tiny fire glow up on what might be the ridge.

[SBitz]

Sorry - hard to quit! Did I mention how beautiful everything looked? Much more so than pre-fire night flights, so maybe it was from having been under dark smoke clouds in poor visibility (and not flying). :}

[Section Make8R]

(I originally sent this via Gmail, I dont know where it went!!) heres my take on your pics all of which were good.

  4th edit:Regarding those little spots up top, my view from down it the flats limits me to the fires on the left side in your picture, I cant see the Romero area anymore as there are ridges, trees etc in my view. So I see the fires as a series of 3 or 4 spot fires running up the hills.   You mentioned something that REALLY had my attention,earlier, and that was the little spots up at the tops of your pics.     

I've been hearing some stories of a great effort to keep the flames from leaping over from the backside, firefighters kept it to north of Camino Cielo.  NOT sure if this is true or not.

Earlier, at dark, there WERE 3 distinct orange spots far west of the main Romero area, WAY up top on the ridge, appeared to be at Camino Cielo.  (I use my old school nikon binocs ) 

I was a bit worried, as it is really directly up over my zone,   bad for me,and thats a BAD place for Montecito in general  (as San Ysidro Canyon really funnels down without any ridges or bumps for firefighters to work from)  If it hops a canyon or so over to the west, its the Cold Springs Canyon,which recently burnt, so fuel load should be much better there.

 So I went down to Hammonds Meadow at the ocean, just to the west of San Ysidro St. to double check on the location of those lights, they appeared to  be fading out. 

  Large flashing orange/red lights up there now at 10:00 are fire vehicles. They must be big ones, as the lights could be mistaken for a hot spot.  They probably are getting calls about them!!

PS copters just made some drops.  Ok lets hope those winds aren't too intense.  And yes thanks to SBitz for providing great pics and content!!!  You have one of them new Tesla Planes huh?  haha...sheesh

[SBitz]

Section Make8R wrote:

(I originally sent this via Gmail, I dont know where it went!!)

I just read it in my email app (free Thunderbird that works on most computers but only nerds love it), where the Subject line started with [SBitz.NET] to identify it. Now I've chosen to reply on SBitZ.NET, which is just the web interface for Google Groups that is hosting our little corner of cyberia.

[SBitz]

Section Make8R wrote:

I've been hearing some stories of a great effort to keep the flames from leaping over from the backside

Makes sense to me, given the IR sat detections over in the valley. We didn't fly over to look, but might try again in coming days and everyone here might be subjected to another blizzard of pix. :)

 

PS copters just made some drops.

I sure appreciate your eyes on reports! Thanks for braving the smoke and crazy traffic to bring us these updates.

 You have one of them new Tesla Planes huh?

I'll let you retain that myth. ;)   There's an old saying along the lines of, "How does a person become poor? They take up aviation."  Not really true, since we like many aviators we know find ways to fly on a budget. It can easily be done for less than many people spend on small used motorhomes, but most people have different priorities. Or to put it differently, lack an addiction to aviation. ;)

Back on your question tho, I was just reading about a prototype electric "drone" that's basically a common quad-copter scaled up to carry one adult. The batteries go about 15 minutes on a 2 hour charge, and they're already building a better model. Times they's a changin' it seems.

[SBitz]

Here's the latest IR fire detections by all available satellites (might only be low-res GOES in this period). Remember that the dots can be at the centers of areas up to 4km square. Not a lot of useful info here, especially since a lot has probably changed in 6 hours and none of them may be very recent. It does give you an idea of what's been going on in the back country and how far Thomas has come since it started (where the red name map pin is).

[SBitz]

Here's the 11pm GOES low-res IR sat, with brightness pumped up to show the very dim detections then. No other detections in the SW region.

[SBitz]

Here's the 11pm smoke forecast, with Thomas still ruling the skies.

[SBitz]

Broadcast Peak view to the East at midnight with brightness pumped way up to show the back country. Stars lower on the horizon that I recall since Tommy lit up.

[SBitz]

Now I'm going to get some sleep because the morning could get interesting. Here's the midnight forecast for surface wind at 10am tomorrow. That dark blue is downslope probably dry wind up to 36mph from the NE over Ventura. The light blue in our SB mountains is up to 24mph. I sure appreciate those crews out there dousing embers all night for us!

[Section Make8R]

quick reply  NE flow at about 5mph....bad bad smoke (new backburn KEYT?)........fires flared up on and off all night, still burning west. I dont have to go further than the north windows here to check progress. I cant see Romero areas any more, its still glowing, but has burnt all the way to the top. Looks like the moon.  The news reports say dont go visit the Ortega Ridge Road, so of course even more people have been going there. Sheriffs should just block it.   Heres hoping those winds dont get too serious, the gardens here in the Hedgerow look better green than purple!!!!  Better purple than burnt though.

Those firefighters cutting line, thats gotta be the hardest job in the world....Intense.Thanks to all those guys.

We have a driveway full of antique cars, and a garage full of birds!!!!  Ha!! (I work and live here)  Just another day eh