How’s the Weather? In Southern California, It’s Wet, Dry, Hot, Cold

Whether wallowing breech-deep in backyard rainwater or contemplating a navel painted puce by the savage sun of August, it helps to remember that Southern California weather is demonstrably the best in the world. Most of the time.

How hot is it, Johnny? How cold, wet, dry, windy, calm? Like the storied blind men attempting to describe an elephant, it all depends on where you are, and when. On the whole, the Southland is a climatic cornucopia. Dig the desert air? Move to Glendora. Seduced by the sea mist? Move to Malibu. Partial to scorching summers? Try the valleys. Semi-nippy winters? Again, try the valleys. Ah, the valleys. . . .

Southern California’s valleys not only have weather systems all their own, they have systems within systems. As a rule, though, they are far and away the hottest places to live in the summer--and, curiously, the coldest in the winter.

Blockaded by surrounding hills, cut off from the soothing salve of the offshore freshets, the Southland’s valleys just sit there and take it, unwilling exemplars of what California would be without the Pacific High.

“Valley weather--all of the onshore weather--depends on how strong the seabreeze is,” explains Art Lessard, meteoroloist-in-charge of the National Weather Service in Southern California. “It’s Mother Nature’s air conditioner, and it’s tricky. It can be going full blast down at the beach, for example, but often enough, somewhere between here (Westwood) and Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, it just shuts off. It might make it to Bundy and that’s it.

“So the summer temperature at the Civic Center hits 90-95 before noon, when the sun isn’t even at its apogee. Around 2 p.m., when the seabreeze picks up, the flags start turning around and the temperature drops to 88, 85, 77. . . .”

“Ironically, the hotter it gets inland, the cooler it’s liable to get. The land is warmed by the sun, heating the air above it. The warm air rises and has to be replaced by something. Into the vacuum rushes the cooler sea air, a nice balancing act that can extend all the way to the Mojave Desert--unless, of course, the wind is blocked by the mountains.

“In the valleys, though, sometimes in the summertime they can be as bad as Death Valley,” says Lessard, who prudently lives in

Brentwood, just a few landscaped miles downwind from the ocean.

And just to rub it in, what valley residents spend on Freon in the summer is compounded by outlay for natural gas in the winter.

A common misconception is that the valleys, without much of a breeze, should be warmer in the winter, which is a crock of chilblains. As always in Southern California, the answer is blowing in the wind.

“During the winter months,” Lessard says, “the San Bernardino Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, east toward Riverside can get quite cold, primarily because little or no air is moving. On a good cold night, it’ll be about 50 degrees in the parking lot here in Westwood, while to the east, it’ll drop down to 29, 28 degrees.

“The air off the ocean is warmer, especially at night. In the sheltered valley areas, the still air will drain downward and settle, as in a bowl. It cools off, gives its heat to the atmosphere, and just sits there.”

At least, then, the valleys aren’t subject to those howling winds that lift roofs, tear the eyes, weaken the moral fiber and blow all the equipment into the swimming pool? Don’t bet your bippy.

“The places where the wind blows most constantly, especially in the summertime, are the beaches; 30-to-35-mile-an-hour winds are not uncommon,” Lessard says.

Where you get your real blasts, though, are through the mountain gaps, the canyons, the riverbeds, “or, as we call them in New Hampshire, the gulches or the notches.

The Truth About Santa Anas

“You don’t find too many areas where the wind blows stronger than through the Cahuenga, Newhall and Cajon Passes during a Santa Ana episode. The northeast-southwest passes (through the valleys) are the worst. Why? Because the Santa Anas whistle down from the northeast. . . .

“I know, I know,” Lessard says, reading another raised eyebrow and anticipating the question. “I read it in the papers and I hear it on the radio all the time: ‘The Santa Ana blows from the south.’ Well it just ain’t so.

“It was named Santa Ana, back in the 1850s, because it blows especially strong through the Santa Ana Canyon. Eventually, the name ‘Santa Ana’ was used to describe these strong northeasterly winds wherever they occurred. Sure, the wind comes from the desert, but from the northeast desert--the Mojave and even farther away; from Nevada, actually, and over the southern Sierra.

“There are probably 300 variations in the world of what we call the Santa Ana--the foehn, the mistral. . . . Here, they occur primarily in the winter months, late fall into early spring, though we can get them at all times of the year. And here again, against popular misconception, they can be very cold winds.”

Air Flows Downhill

How and why do they start? “Air acts much like water,” Lessard explains. “The Great Basin area--Nevada, western Utah, southern Idaho--fills up with cold air and overflows, just spills over, like water, and runs ‘downhill’ toward Catalina, Southern California generally, and out over the ocean.

“The air is usually cold and it’s very, very dry, since it originates over the interior and passes over no appreciable water. It clears the atmosphere beautifully. I can look out the window here and see the white surf along the Catalina coast. Marvelous!

“But the ‘Santa Ana’ air is not as cold when it gets to the L.A. Basin as it was when it started out, thank God. What happens is, it starts out at, say 5,000 feet, but by the time it reaches the L.A. coastal area, maybe 500 feet, it’s undergone considerable warming. Not from the Southern California heat, but because the air has been compressed as it descends and howls through the passes.”

Does the Santa Ana depress people? “Well, I guess you’d have to ask a psychologist about that, but I think so. They say people go nuts during the foehn. I know that in Switzerland, they close down businesses, law courts.

“There certainly is discomfort during an extended Santa Ana condition. Me, I can’t stand it.

“The humidity can drop to 10%, or even less. People say their sinuses dry up. Personally, I itch all over the place. I break out in rashes. My fingers start to crack. There’s all sorts of static electricity. It’s so damn dry .”

Lessard starts to twitch, and the subject is quickly shunted to something damper, even dank: that interminable, cloying fog that plagues our beaches in early summer. As usual, there’s an answer for that, too, and for once the poor valleys are spared.

The beach fog, like so much of our weather, is galvanized by the peripatetic habits of our hero, the Eastern Pacific High, moving north with the sun. In the summer, the High is particularly strong and feisty, intensifying the winds along the coast. The winds in turn push the water south (the clockwise syndrome). The displaced current is replaced by colder water from the sea depths, a phenomenon known as “upwelling.”

At the onset of summer, then, there is a swelling band of cold water, hundreds of miles wide, between Southern California and the High. The band doesn’t stabilize until August. Thus August and September are the Southland’s “best months,” according to Lessard.

Room, Time to Condense

Meanwhile, the warm, moist seabreeze, blowing across an unwonted span of colder surface water, has more room and time to condense. By the time it hits the shore, it has turned to cloud, or fog.

“The cloudy period is late May through July,” says Lessard. “Sometimes you won’t see the sun at all, or it’ll poke through for two or three hours. It could very well be sunny east of the beach (yes, in the poor, benighted valleys), while it’s very overcast and a lot cooler at the beach.”

If the breeze is strong enough, the fog and low clouds can be blown all the way up to the foothills. “It can be overcast in San Gabriel, all the way to Riverside. Other times, the fog will dissipate by the time it gets to Sepulveda Boulevard. The temperature can be 15 or 20 degrees warmer right past the fog line, but near the beach, it’s murky, cool, wet. You almost feel the air.”

If the fog kind of messes up the mornings, at least the Santa Monicans know it’s coming--which puts them one up on the denizens in Long Beach. In Long Beach, from June through September, they never know what’s going to hit them.

“The Long Beach area has a climate all its own,” says Lessard, who studied the area intensively as a consultant to the Olympic sailing events. “It’s really strange. The winds hit the Palos Verdes Peninsula; some are deflected north, some south and there are some areas, east of the peninsula, where the streams join up.

“The breeze over Long Beach, San Pedro, the whole area, can be blowing one way, then the other, then it’ll shift again as the day progresses. You watch the smokestacks of the refineries and you’ll see quite a dance.

“The sailors know about the crazy winds down there, I guarantee it. And they know about Catalina Eddy, too.”

Eddy’s No Pool Huster

Catalina Eddy is not an island pool hustler, but rather an unusual weather condition that has a “dramatic” effect on coastal Southern California, usually from May to August, though it can occur at almost any time.

“It’s kind of hard to describe,” says Lessard, who nevertheless gives it his best shot. “Basically, it’s a mini-low-pressure area in the Catalina Island area. Being a low, it spins the air counter clockwise, so instead of getting a good, stiff seabreeze from the west, the winds blow from the south. We pick it up around San Diego and it usually works its way up to Santa Barbara.

“What you frequently get is a solid mass of clouds, very shallow, sometimes from Ensenada to Point Concepcion. Even though it’s tiny compared to the Pacific High, the Catalina Eddy is continually pumping that moisture northward, and the sun can’t burn it all off.

“Which is why you’d better check before you go to the beach in the summer. You may need a fan in North Hollywood, but on the same day you’ll need a blanket at Zuma.”

All things considered, though, it’s not a bad place to live, especially to Art Lessard, the refugee from New Hampshire.

Lessard disputes the fact that the sunsets are a lot less vivid in Southern California--a lapse a Down Easterner would attribute either to eating lotuses or a short memory span--but he freely concedes that California clouds, such as they are, are considerably less cuddly.

“I miss ‘em, sure,” he says, “but knowing what I know, it’s not exactly a deprivation. To get those huge, billowing clouds, the fluffy ones that make such beautiful post cards back East, you have to have a good, strong influx of moist, unstable air.

“They’re storm clouds. They mean thunderstorms, hail, maybe a tornado; something that’ll smash the windshield of your car. Yeah, they’re something I can live without.”

A Cloudless Paradise?

To Lessard, then, as well as to the rest of us, Southern California remains a cloudless climatic paradise. The question is, will it stay that way?

The hero remains the Eastern Pacific High, a fixture that is permanent as far as the meteorologists can ascertain, but there’s a villain among us, too--a capricious creature called Man.

“Comparing weather records since the first station opened here in 1877,” Lessard says, “it’s easy to see that the climate has been gradually warming up. In 1886, the average mean temperature was 62 1/2 degrees. Now it’s almost 68. That’s a helluva jump, when you consider the worldwide implications (polar caps melting, seas rising, Los Angeles under 20 feet of sea), and urbanization is probably the biggest factor.

Surfaces Reflecting Heat

“I’m talking about the loss of citrus groves and forests and grassland--paving everything over. Rather than the ground absorbing the heat, where it’s built up, the surface reflects the heat, and the temperature rises, inexorably, creating a ‘heat island’ around our cities, altering the climate.

“We may have reached the point, though, where we’re saturated, so it may level off, or at least slow down.

“Things do change. I’m sure this was a great town in 1877, maybe better than it is today. But let’s face it, we wouldn’t be here without urbanization.

“It’s warming up, sure. On the other hand, you could get major volcanic activity, with the ash blocking out the sun’s incoming radiation, and end with an Ice Age.

“Hell, no, I’m not worried. They probably worried in the Middle Ages over what the climate would be in the 20th Century, and here we are.”

For that matter, it wasn’t too far in the past that another New Hampshireman, Robert Frost, pondered the same perils: “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. . . . “

Unlike Art Lessard, Robert Frost never lived in California.