Daniel Swain in The Los Angeles Times: Strong Winds Flip Trucks like Toys, Blow down Trees in Southern California

February is typically the state’s wettest month, bringing an average rainfall of 3.8 inches to downtown L.A. But there have been only trace amounts of precipitation in downtown so far this month, according to National Weather Service data. From a wildfire risk perspective, the “worst possible sequence would be continued dry February followed by brief burst of wet conditions in spring,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote on Twitter.