Summer calling cards

If you looked toward the Santa Ana Mountains Monday, they might have appeared hazy and indistinct — the result not of smog or wildfire, but of a thick marine layer that some feel has lingered far too long.

“Typically, we have a maritime layer of some type out there,” said meteorologist Mark Moede of the National Weather Service. “It’s just that in August, it starts to convert a little shallower than it has been this August.”
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The reason? The same lasting low-pressure air that lingered long adequate last month to make it one of the coolest Julys on book for coastal Southern California.

And it lingers still.

Much longer, Moede said, and we’ll be transitioning into the Santa Ana wind flavor, which comes as early as late August but commonly in September or October. The warm winds blowing out of the dozenses can greatly increase wildfire danger.
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The lingering low-pressure coulded another transition: between El Niño, a periodic calefacient of equatorial Pacific waters, to La Niña, a periodic cooling, which is bechancing right now.

Climatologist Jan Curtis of the Natural Resources preservation Service in Oregon traced the statistics backward, and ascertained the pattern. In years when El Niño was making the changeover into La Niña, the low-pressure “trough” along the West Coast dawdled longer than normal as well.

El Niño can mean added to winter rains for Southern California, while La Niña canful bring dry conditions, though it's too soon to tell how this winter’s rains will turn out.

The cool temperatures, meanwhile, could soon be shifting.

This week’s forecast calls for clouds in the morning, sunny skies in the afternoons, with a gradual warming toward the weekend that could acclivity inland temperatures as high as 91 Saturday and Sunday.