No good news from weatherman Alex Tardy

The National Weather Service (NWS) San Diego’s Public Information Officer Alex Tardy traveled on the most luckiest of days for him to Idyllwild for a Town Hall meeting to speak on “Our Crazy Weather,” a title Mountain Disaster Preparedness President Mike Feyder coined following unprecedented heat waves and a tropical cyclone this summer.

Mountain Disaster Prepardness President Mike Feyder introduces National Weather Service Public Information Officer Alex Tardy Wednesday night, Sept. 28, at Town Hall.
PHOTO BY BECKY CLARK

Tardy stopped all along Highway 243 to shoot videos of the fluke storm of lightning, thunder, hail and flash flooding Wednesday, Sept. 28, before his talk. “I’m a nerd that way,” he told the 30 or so people who showed up after the storm had passed.

Despite the heavy precipitation brought to Idyllwild that day, Tardy did not bring good news. He said Southern California is heading into its third consecutive La Niña winter, a situation not seen before. Also, he said it is extremely unusual to get rain in September; the monsoonal season is usually over.

Hurricane Kay, in itself, was rare. He said the last time that happened was in 1992. All of that sounds good but Tardy was not optimistic because vegetation is so dry from the past few years of drought that all it will take is a couple of Santa Ana wind conditions to dry it out more and create a large fire this fall or the beginning of winter.

The San Jacinto Mountains need large snowpacks up high during winter with slow melts, not sudden, heavy downpours that run off into the ocean, he said.

These heavy downpours also create what look like lava flows after a major fire such as what happened recently in the San Bernardino Mountains, and “the after effect of the fires can be worse,” Tardy said.

When asked why we are having another La Niña winter instead of an El Niño winter, Tardy said, “We don’t know.” And when asked if the winter following this one is predictable, he said the same thing. “Honestly, we don’t know if that’s a sign of things to come in the next three years or 30 years or how long.”

He explained that La Niña and El Niño are phenomenon that occur to balance the tropics around the equator where storms are infrequent. But the normal cycle isn’t happening. “We don’t know why and it’s only happened a few times in history … Something is out of sync,” he added.

Right now, he said, there’s a huge high-pressure dome over the desert regions creating excessive heat in the atmosphere, thus we experienced higher and longer temperature days this summer. That’s not unusual, he said, but we also have one over the ocean and that’s not normal. “We can’t get rid of that,” he said.

“It’s not the hottest summer on record,” he said, “but it was approaching one of the hottest summers on record.” For Southern California, 2022 was the second highest on record. For the entire state, 2021 was the hottest and 2022 was around seventh or eighth, he said.

When asked what it would take to make up for a drought year, Tardy said it would take two El Niño years per La Niña year but they would have to be in a row. So, three consecutive La Niña years would require six consecutive El Niño years. “But if we did that, we’d have too much flooding; too much snow pack.”

And, unfortunately, he said, we still haven’t recovered from the 2014-2015 drought.

“Is this the worst drought we’ve seen?” he asked. The 1970s were dismal, “worse than the droughts of 2012-2016 and 2020-2022.”

What is going on down by the equator was good with Hurricane Kay. Kay temporarily cooled the water. “But there’s so much warm in the Pacific … lack of storms, lack of mixing up the water, lack of many things …”

“In the 1990s, the atmosphere was cyclic.” They could predict the weather, “but now we can’t.”

During the recent San Bernardino Mountain storms, Tardy said people’s Ring and outdoor video devices captured what was happening and this has contributed to NWS’ ability to research storms and other weather phenomenon to help understand the unusual weather.

NWS has a program called Weather Spotters 24 hours a day. To report any unusual weather events, call 1-800-240-3022 or visit weather.gov/sandiego. At the site, click on “Submit Report” under the Current Hazards tab or visit http://swskywarn.org/.

Send any photos to [email protected] or [email protected].

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