Violent Thunderstorms In Southern California

[erik]

It's the second day of summer, and we here in Southern California are being hit with lines of violent thunderstorms due to an extra-tropical cutoff low pressure area off of L.A.:

www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-22/thunderstorms-lightning-hit-southern-california-as-monsoonal-moisture-moves-through

[rick]

Erik --

Not sure about Pasadena, but the lightning and thunder started where I am near the coast before midnight. They just showed on the 3 p.m. KABC-TV newscast that a 51-year-old woman and her two dogs were struck by lightning and killed near Whittier.

Being a SoCal native, my memory is that "monsoon" season is usually around August. It was the same way when I lived out in the desert. For this to be happening right at the start of summer is alarming. Supposedly it is very bad out by Beaumont and Cabazon.

Hang in there.

[erik]

It just seemed to get set up this way. The moisture just got pulled up right out of the sub-tropics by this cut-off low (named because it is a low pressure area cut off from the main flow of the jet stream), and it so moistened and destabilized the atmosphere. And yes, the first reports most certainly came along the coast near midnight. In my case, I was awakened at just before 4 AM by what sounded like a giant bowling game taking place outside--then I saw the flashes of lightning through the closed curtain.

But it was on my way to work that it got particularly hair-raising. The rain was pouring down so hard outside that I could barely here anything else; and the lightning was incredibly close by, striking almost right outside the car. It was quite hair-raising, almost something like one would experience at this time of the year in places like Dallas or Oklahoma City.

And it is indeed unusual for this kind of monsoonal moisture to be affecting us so early on, just the second day of summer. I wouldn't doubt that it is fairly brutal out towards Beaumont and Cabazon, and even Palm Springs.

Apart from that windstorm that hit us at the end of November 2011, which tore apart almost every electrical power pole in Temple City in half, what I saw this morning was some of the most violent weather I have ever experienced in my entire life of living here in Southern California.