Colder weather ahead, wood-burning prohibition to take effect
BY Jill Cowan Californian staff writer jcowan@bakersfield.com
Now that a mild Halloween has come and gone, Bakersfield residents should steel themselves for dropping temperatures (and a little fall of rain) later this week, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.
"Friday we're only going to manage to get up to the upper 50s," NWS meteorologist Jim Andersen said. "So yeah, a big change -- and we're going to have a chance for showers on Friday as well."
Andersen said showers will be a possibility starting Thursday night, though he said that likely won't be a "huge rain event."
"The big story here is the cold," he said.
At higher elevations -- like 3,500 feet in the northern Sierra Mountains and at 4,500 feet in the southern Sierras -- Andersen said, it may even snow.
Still, "it's not going to be a blockbuster as far as amounts of (precipitation) -- a couple inches at the highest elevations," he said. "We're not talking big snows here."
Though the valley will likely avoid nor'easter-like conditions, Andersen said the normal temperature for Bakersfield in November is 65.7 degrees, meaning Friday's anticipated drop from the rest of the week's mid-70s down to the 50s will definitely register.
"People will notice it," Andersen said.
Temperatures are expected to creep back up into the 60s starting Saturday, and will "hover right there around normal" early next week.
And as for the rain, he said, "we're pretty much right on schedule."
The beginning of November is usually the start of the rainy period, Andersen said.
But Kern County residents might want to hold off on having pre-holiday logs crackling in the fireplace.
A news release from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District said a "daylong, mandatory" wood-burning curtailment will be in effect from 12 a.m. Wednesday to the following midnight in the valley portion of Kern County.
The wood-burning prohibition (for households that have access to natural gas service) is the second for Kern County this season.
Prohibition violations -- which include burning any solid fuel in a residential fireplace or wood-burning device -- are subject to fines, the news release said.
For more information about the wood-burning forecast, which is tied to air quality measurements, visit www.valleyair.org.
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