Is Santa bringing El Nino for Xmas?...
SURF:
Are your arms tired yet?
FORECAST:
Monday starts to clean up and the NW swell starts to drop to the chest high range. Tuesday is small but clean.
WEATHER:
Lots of windy storms the past month but no real drenchers. Newport has received 0.62" this season (23% of normal), Oceanside 1.66" (66% of normal), and San Diego 2.32" (100% of normal). Even though the totals don't look that bad, we're still not on track to make a real dent in our drought.
BEST BET:
Sunday will have the biggest surf in the next week but also the messiest conditions. So maybe smaller cleaner surf on Tuesday before the next storm hits?
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
The LA Times reported this week that the Pacific Northwest has had a ton of rain to start our El Nino Winter, while down here, not much. But it looks like things are changing as evident by the weather forecast above and the observations of some prominent scientists below. Is this finally the start of the real rain we've been waiting for? Here's what they had to say...
A powerful El Niño continues to gain strength, the latest forecast released December 10th said. And while El Niño rains are still weeks away from hitting their stride in California, another weather phenomenon that has exacerbated the state's drought has lifted, allowing heavy storms to target the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. "Of all the years in which there was a strong El Niño present in the tropical Pacific Ocean, this is the wettest start to any of those years that we've observed in the Pacific Northwest, both in Portland and Seattle," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at Stanford University. Powerful rains struck Oregon hard last week, according to the National Weather Service. Last Wednesday, one woman drowned when her car entered floodwaters, and another woman was killed after a falling tree crushed her Portland home, according to local news reports.
These heavy rains show that the infamous “ridiculously resilient ridge” of high pressure — the weather phenomenon that pushed storms away from California and fueled years of severe drought — has not returned this winter. The absence of the high pressure mass now allows powerful storms to barrel in from the North Pacific. The forecast comes as a new report last week by the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center announced this year’s El Niño is still on track to be one of the strongest on record. "The current El Niño remains strong and is likely to stay strong through the winter," Mike Halpert, the center's deputy director, said.
The recent storms in the Pacific Northwest and California, however, are not directly related to El Niño. "The key season is really still to come," Halpert said. "California so far has been somewhat normal in the northern part of the state and drier than average in the south." But the heavy rains hitting the Pacific Northwest are a preview of the effects of El Niño expected to sweep through California in the coming winter months, said Swain, the Stanford climate scientist. "These rains are shifting southward," Swain said. "The northernmost part of California is now starting to get in on it.” For Southern California, the biggest rains of the season won’t be coming for at least a few more weeks — possibly starting Christmas week; as El Niño storms generally peak in California in January, February and March. Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the recent storm system clearly shows the breakdown of the drought-causing mass of high pressure. "We haven’t seen an El Niño storm yet," Patzert said. "The El Niño storms will be riding a subtropical jet stream. It'll look like a convoy coming straight out of the west." Patzert offered another explanation for the storm system hitting the Pacific Northwest: "This is an 'atmospheric river' that’s hosing Washington and Oregon," he said. "It originated near the Philippines and moved in a northeasterly direction. It's a very narrow band of high moisture."
El Niño events have been responsible for two of California’s wettest and most destructive rainy seasons, in the winters of 1982-83 and 1997-98. Experts have said a potentially powerful El Niño this coming winter could be the beginning of the end of the drought. But the storm impacts still offer a good preview for California, Patzert said. "In some ways, atmospherically, it'll be different. But the impact that they're getting is exactly what we're expecting in January and February in California."
El Niño is a phenomenon involving a section of the Pacific Ocean west of Peru that warms up, causing alterations in the atmosphere that can cause dramatic changes in weather patterns globally. Strong El Niños strengthen the track of winter storms targeting California and the southern United States, while the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America see less rain, and the northern United States, like the Midwest and Northeast, see milder winters. This year’s El Niño is expected to remain strong through the winter, with a key location of the Pacific Ocean clocking in hotter than ever recorded in at least 25 years, according to the Climate Prediction Center. The weather pattern already has proved its strength this year in other parts of the world. El Niño has been blamed for drought and wildfires in Indonesia, and the United Nations is warning about millions at risk from hunger in eastern and southern Africa and Central America from drought. El Niño is believed to have played a role in the storms this spring that caused floods and ended droughts in Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma. It’s also a factor in an unusual hurricane season. In October, an eastern Pacific hurricane, Patricia, became the strongest such cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere before it slammed into Mexico. "El Niño has been here since January. It's been strong all through the summer," Patzert said. "For the U.S., many of El Niño's biggest impacts is expected in early 2016." But don’t expect it to be a drought-buster, experts said. "Even though we have this really high confidence in a wet January, February, March, that does not mean that we have high confidence that the drought will be over by the end of winter,” Swain said. "These long-running precipitation deficits are just so big that they're almost insurmountable in a single year." By one calculation, California’s mountainous north would need 2 1/2 times to three times its average precipitation to end this drought. The record is just nearly double the average annual rain and snowfall, which occurred in 1983, during the second biggest El Niño on record.
PIC OF THE WEEK:
It's better to give than to receive. So this holiday season I'm giving you these empty lefts. Just can't remember where I hid them...
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Easily Excited
Played BB-8 in Episode VII
Aiming To Be The 1st Person To Surf At Age 1 And 100
