 Thanks for joining us. I'm Brian May in the state operations center at the Cal OES headquarters just outside Sacramento today day 13 of the Thomas fire, a fire that is now the third largest fire in California history. And as expected, the red flag warnings up and down the state of California had made firefighting conditions very difficult today to talk more about that. I'm joined by Scott Birch with the National Weather Service. Scott, thank you first of all for joining us. Talk about the conditions and we see the numbers on here of some of the gusts. Talk about the conditions that firefighters saw on this Saturday as you guys anticipated. Yeah, it was a really windy day today. There was strong north winds really across California, but they worked down to the south and there was actually some canyons here north of Santa Barbara that funneled the winds. And those are the classic sundowners you may have heard. There are north winds in the canyons above Santa Barbara. So we had wind gusts 65 miles an hour that impacted the northern end of the fire up by Santa Barbara. What causes gusts like that and winds like this? It's winds that are going down the slope so the momentum actually increases as they go down and plus they funnel through the canyons. It's kind of like a river flowing through rocks how the current picks up. The winds do the same thing. How hard is it for you guys to forecast and give these firefighters accurate descriptions of what they're going to be doing? It's hard, but we do have better tools than we used to have. We have a lot more powerful computers. We have a new satellite actually. We have a new satellite that was just launched last spring. So we have better tools. It's still hard, but we use our expertise and our tools to do the best we can. I will say this. We have briefings at Cal OES throughout the day and I believe every single one of our briefings begin with you guys at the National Weather Service. The role that you guys play in this firefighting effort is crucial for these firefighters, isn't it? Yeah, weather is actually one of the main things that drives the fire and the fire spread. So it is important and with ICS, one of the first things that they teach you and what they want to have you do is start with the weather because it really sets the picture for the rest of the day. Alright, speaking of the rest of the day, let's talk about the rest of the weekend. This now the forecast of what we're looking at the rest of the weekend. That's right. So our north winds that we had today, they're starting to slowly shift around to the northeast and to the east. So this is a pattern that's a classic Santa Ana wind event. It's also dry winds, hot winds, and they're the winds that actually sparked the fires in the first place that we're fighting now. You can see the winds overnight are going to shift to northeast to east and tomorrow it looks like we're going to be in Santa Ana conditions basically the whole day. And that could go on beyond Sunday as well? It'll go into Monday morning. And I know you're just the messenger here. Is there any chance of any kind of precipitation down south? Not down south for the next 10 days. It's just dangerous conditions, isn't it? That's right. Alright, Scott Burch with the National Weather Service. Thank you so much. We've talked to our crews throughout the day. You've seen these N95 masks. If you are in the fire zones, make sure you have masks on if you go outside. Also make sure that you're listening to all of your local agencies. If there are evacuation warnings, heed those warnings and leave immediately. For the very latest on all of the wildfires throughout California, you can go to our website, wildfirerecovery.org. I'm Brian May in the State Operations Center. Thanks for watching.