Tag: Weather

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I’ve been zombie-fied.

Comic-Con was fun, but exhausting. Add that to staying up too late last night and not being used to the heat…

You see, downtown San Diego was fairly nice all week. According to weather.com it only hit 83, which was uncomfortable when carrying a heavy backpack (or in Katie’s case, wearing a heavy pirate costume) in the sun, but quite comfortable in the shade or with a breeze. We got our first taste of what things have been like back home when we stopped for a bathroom break near the Irvine Spectrum area around sunset last night. It felt warmer at sunset in Irvine than it did in mid-afternoon in San Diego.

I don’t think the bedroom ever really cooled off last night, even with a fan running in the window all night.

Then after a night of “sleep” I got into work and I started hearing about temperatures hitting 108. It’s just… astonishing.

Anyway, I’m currently on twice my normal daily dose of coffee and I’m still spacing out and mistyping stuff.

(Originally posted on LiveJournal.)

Current Mood: 😴tired

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Well, June Gloom seems to be over, and we’re now into the time of year when we get hot, sunny days with lots of clouds. Big, towering cumulus clouds, often with anvil heads, promising shade and rain to cool things down. The teases.

Yeah, we see those clouds most afternoons—on the horizon, just on the other side of the coastal mountains!

While it’s great for summer activities—beach trips, swimming, hiking, etc.—it can also be frustrating when you have to choose between running your electricity-guzzling air conditioner all day or leaving your window open all night. The clouds are right there, taunting you with relief from the heat—relief that will not come.

Clouds on the horizon

When I was in high school, my family took a vacation across the Great American SouthwestTM. We went to Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. We drove out to Mesa Verde, which wasn’t a canyon, but there were still a lot of cliffs. We came back through Arizona, where we stopped by Meteor Crater and Sunset Crater. We joked that it was a tour of all the big holes in the ground. (A few years later, I posted some photos from this trip online.)

The weird thing about it was that we went during August, and we got rained on at least briefly almost every afternoon—but only outside of California. Utah? Rain. Arizona? Rain. Colorado? Rain. I don’t think we got rained on during our three hours in Nevada (we stopped at Valley of Fire on the way out), but as I recall, the rain stopped about the time we crossed from Arizona back into California.

We don’t get summer storms much here in SoCal.

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With luck the people complaining about the “unseasonable” morning cloud cover have all realized we get the same thing every year. Although I don’t think it usually lasts this far into July. We were standing at the America Plaza transfer station on Thursday morning, watching the fog roll in past the buildings at the south end, but by the time we hit the Gaslamp district for lunch, it was all cleared away.

We noticed an interesting coastal climate zone, though. On the trip down Wednesday afternoon, the clouds came in somewhere around Mission Viejo or San Juan Capistrano and stayed locked in all the way through La Jolla. It finally started clearing up just as we were reaching San Diego. Then on the trip back, a bit later in the afternoon on Sunday, the clouds rolled in as we reached La Jolla and didn’t break up until we reached Mission Viejo. We stopped in San Clemente for coffee (it was a long weekend with lots of walking and not much sleep), and the barista asked us if we’d been to Oceanfest, adding that it wasn’t really a good day for it. We explained we were on our way back from San Diego, he asked whether it was better down there, and we told him that it was warm and clear—but only south of La Jolla.

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An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly as much rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.