A couple weeks back I blogged here about the heat and perpetual sunshine that defined much of my first month in LA. And undoubtedly many readers of this blog will have seen a news story somewhere on last week's all-time record high temperature of 113 degrees Fahrenheit that was reached at the official downtown station just before the thermometer broke (meaning it might have gotten even hotter, but we just don't know). Even though it cooled off after that record-setting Monday, temperatures cooled slowly - down to "only" 100 degrees on Tuesday and then topping out at 90 degrees every day through Saturday.
This week? An entirely different story. Two of the four days so far this week we've been cooler in LA than in San Francisco. In fact, our high temperature on Monday this week was about 50 degrees cooler than our all-time record high temperature just one week prior. So far this week we've recorded a quarter-inch of rain (this during the tail-end of our dry season!). WTF is going on?
I'll tell ya, kids. :-)
It's actually something that I saw happen on a number of occasions when I was living in San Francisco, but this weather pattern doesn't typically impact SF. We have a cutoff low sitting off the coast west of San Diego. A cutoff low is a low-pressure system (the kind that are associated with clouds and rain) that has detached from the general flow of weather systems, moving from west to east. In this case, the low has been just hanging out for a few days, spinning up rain clouds from the central California coast all the way out to Arizona and Colorado, where big thunderstorms and tornadoes are the story right now.
The cutoff low will be out of here tonight and tomorrow and we'll gradually return to 80s and sunshine - i.e. the norm for this time of year. In the meantime, I'm actually enjoying the wacky weather we've been having, from the really hot to the really cool, the sunshine and the rain. It's fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment