Still watching the fires in South Georiga, which continue to burn mostly uncontained … here is the animation using 10 minute frames from GOES East this morning …
The sea breeze front should drive some of the smoke away from the coast this afternoon, but it will return overnight, and inland there are waves of the stuff wafting through all the way in to South Carolina …
There are wildfires all over the state now. The big ones remain only 10 to 30% contained. The fire in Clinch County (biggest plume near Florida) is over 30,000 acres, the big one near Brunswick is over 5,000 acres. For more information check the Georgia Forestry Commission wildfire update page.
There is now a burn ban over most of Georgia and North Florida. PLEASE DON”T DO ANY OUTDOOR BURNS! Limiting anything that can throw a spark is a good idea. To give you an idea of how dry it is, I put a new soil moisture sensor in a few weeks ago. It was completely saturated when installed. Watch what happened … the soil sucked all of the water out of it, and now it is showing the lower limit of 200cb, which is the same as if the soil had been baked in an oven for an hour to drive all of the water out!
There is some chance for rain this weekend, up to 50% chance Saturday night. That will be welcome for the firefighters, but it will take many such events to fix our drought.
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