Strong winds associated with a dry cold front have put us in a Red Flag Warning with respect to fire danger. We can expect to see southwest winds picking up in the afternoon again, blowing 20-30 mph with gusts in excess of 40 mph. Skies will be mostly sunny and humidity will be low, likely approaching single digit values.

Over the weekend, the dry cold front moves through, dropping high temperatures from the low-80s Friday into the upper 70s on Saturday and Sunday. Temperatures rebound back into the mid-80s for the first of next week.

Can an earthquake far away affect the tectonics (earthquake potential) in another area? That’s a tough question. There’s no way to say for sure if the 6.0 earthquake that hit the Wells area several years ago had any effect on the earthquake swarm in NW Reno which started a week later. It’s not likely that it did, but there’s no way to say for sure.

 

But here’s another way to compare one earthquake to another of differing magnitudes: A 7.0 earthquake releases about 30 times the energy than a 6.0 quake, which in turn releases 30 times the energy of the 5.0 earthquake. So a 7.0 earthquake has nearly 1,000 times the energy release as a 5.0 quake.