The Santa Ana Winds have returned to the Southland and a follow-up to the predicted arctic trough on the West Coast, and even a cutoff pattern on Saturday for some. Read on for details …
The Santa Ana Winds surfaced on time this morning. Wind gusts over 50 mph has been recorded at Ontario International Airport. Delays, cancellations, and diverting of aircraft have been prevalent today. Airlines have diverted to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and even Palm Springs. This is due to the airport’s runway being east to west on a northeast wind … so the cross-wind is extremely tough for a pilot to land as he or she would have to land at an angle.
Wind gusts elsewhere have been on par to 30-50 mph in the Santa Ana Wind Prone zones, with locations in the Low Deserts seeing the strong north winds as well.
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Gusts are expected to continue through the day, waning down tonight in all areas. If you’re in Phoenix, Arizona this evening into the overnight, a north to south flow off the mountains to the north will bring strong wind gusts … which could impact travel in and out of the Sky Harbor Airport.
A brief break on Friday is expected before another round hits on Saturday.
The system around is particularly interesting because the actual cutoff system moving into the region does bring with it some moisture and upper dynamics. Be it from the High Desert, Inland Empire, Orange, or San Diego areas … the exact track of this is not known due to the cutoff nature. Given the type of system it is… if it does manage to move across the area… we may introduce a ‘surprise’ quick developing area of convective activity in a very small section of the forecast area, including a dusting of snow in the mountains. More will be known later on Friday and short term forecasting will need to be done for Saturday.
As the system drops south into Baja on Saturday night into especially Sunday … the backside would provide strong northeast winds in the form of Santa Anas …
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The longer range suggests this warm pattern is coming to an end for a bit. Christmas looks to be colder than average, both day and night. Sometime between December 21st and the 24th we have an arctic trough that comes down into the area. This arctic trough will either be just to the east of us, bringing in damaging northwest winds through the LA areas … or it’ll be right over us. Any system dropping into the region would cutoff south of here and provide the chance of a storm system capable of low elevation snowfall, be it the High Desert or Valley areas. Such a system is rare .. but the pattern for those rare events would be the one coming up.
So… I am still looking at the chance of that arctic air moving in just before Christmas… and Christmas should feel like Christmas out there… none of this warm air like we are seeing lately.
Stay tuned to Southern California Weather Force for any additional updates
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