RE: Amazing how long we went without complaining about the weather in 2020
09-07-2020, 04:14 AM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2020, 04:39 AM by Labster.)
09-07-2020, 04:14 AM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2020, 04:39 AM by Labster.)
It's a little disconcerting that Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the Moon all decided to be Mars-colored tonight. I'm pretty sure I saw this in one of the end-season episodes of Sailor Moon. Oh, and incidentally, no stars are visible, not even Vega. Lots of smoke aloft. But because of that inversion layer, very little of it is dropping into the bottom layer right by the ocean (boundary layer) where I can breathe it. Still seeing absurd things like temperature varying 30 degrees (~15°C) across my own mid-sized city, depending on if you go up in the hills a 1000ft or so or stay near the beach.
Let's just take a look at this thing, based on the weather balloon data (radiosonde):
This is called a skew-T log-p diagram, because the temperature goes the right on the blue lines (isotherms), and the pressure roughly corresponds to height. The red line is the actual temperature observed, while the green line is the dewpoint. It's from Vandenburg, where they launch the rockets, which is the closest station to LA. That jag to the right is pretty massive. And then it follows the green line (dry adiabatic lapse rate), which basically means everything from about 5 km down is sinking in a giant warm layer. Fun times. Oh, and you can also see the 500mb level is at 596dm (~6km!), that's probably also a record high pressure.
What this ended up doing is setting an all-time record high for not just LA County, but the entire forecast area (should I say "the quad-counties?") of 121° at the edge of the San Fernando Valley. This wasn't an isolated area, downtown LA hit 111°. So you know, a giant city with temperatures roughly like Death Valley. Slight offshore winds (LAX-DAG gradient of -1.5mb) just to keep the warm air in place and give it a little downslope support. Basically, the perfect heat wave hit Southern California.
Naturally, a few fires started. Luckily, not enough wind to spread them quickly.
So, everyone went to the coast, where it was much cooler. Just like there were major spikes in coronavirus infections in the weeks following Memorial Day and Independence Day, it's pretty obvious to forecast that the deaths from this heat wave will mostly be on a one-month delay.
Let's just take a look at this thing, based on the weather balloon data (radiosonde):
This is called a skew-T log-p diagram, because the temperature goes the right on the blue lines (isotherms), and the pressure roughly corresponds to height. The red line is the actual temperature observed, while the green line is the dewpoint. It's from Vandenburg, where they launch the rockets, which is the closest station to LA. That jag to the right is pretty massive. And then it follows the green line (dry adiabatic lapse rate), which basically means everything from about 5 km down is sinking in a giant warm layer. Fun times. Oh, and you can also see the 500mb level is at 596dm (~6km!), that's probably also a record high pressure.
What this ended up doing is setting an all-time record high for not just LA County, but the entire forecast area (should I say "the quad-counties?") of 121° at the edge of the San Fernando Valley. This wasn't an isolated area, downtown LA hit 111°. So you know, a giant city with temperatures roughly like Death Valley. Slight offshore winds (LAX-DAG gradient of -1.5mb) just to keep the warm air in place and give it a little downslope support. Basically, the perfect heat wave hit Southern California.
Naturally, a few fires started. Luckily, not enough wind to spread them quickly.
So, everyone went to the coast, where it was much cooler. Just like there were major spikes in coronavirus infections in the weeks following Memorial Day and Independence Day, it's pretty obvious to forecast that the deaths from this heat wave will mostly be on a one-month delay.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto