The Brief

Several days out from this latest storm, I spoke to a number of meteorologists and was told the weather models are all over the place, so we don’t quite know what’s going to happen. It could hit L.A. hard or peter out.

It was interesting to hear, as I cover climate and weather in Southern California, and forecasts usually seem a bit more confident in the four or five days leading up to a weather event.

Turns out, this storm and the conditions surrounding it were so wildly complicated that weather models were having trouble settling on what was going to happen.

“The dimension, scale and motion of the big feature that’s driving the large-scale weather pattern…that’s what’s different about this,” said Ariel Cohen, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Precipitation on its way to California on February 16, 2024

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Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere

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National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Modeling the interaction of various atmospheric features — from the atmospheric river off the west coast to the storm system up near Alaska — can be a struggle. Especially when models are trying to project several days out and anticipate what rainfall is going to be like at a neighborhood scale.

“That storm system that’s up near Alaska — how’s that going to move forward?” said Paul Iñiguez, a meteorologist with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “If it went faster than we expected or it went slower than we expected, that's going to impact how it interacts with that decaying atmospheric river that's laid up on the west coast.”

One set of variables could lead to heavier precipitation in L.A. while another could mean lighter.

People view the Los Angeles River swollen by storm runoff as a powerful long-duration atmospheric river storm, the second in less than a week, continues to impact Southern California on February 5, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

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Mario Tama

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What are weather models?

Meteorological agencies around the world simulate global weather multiple times a day. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does it every six hours and projects 15 days into the future.

They can take data from satellites, balloons, airplanes and weather stations, and use equations that represent our best understanding of the physics that govern the atmosphere, the ocean and the cryosphere to project weather on the way. And they switch out variables to calculate different potential outcomes.

“There are fundamental limits to how well you can do it because the atmosphere is chaotic,” said Tapio Schneider, a professor at Caltech. “Chaotic means that what happens later is sensitively dependent on the initial condition, on the state right now. So there's a fundamental limit to how well you can predict the weather, something like two weeks or so, beyond which you cannot say in detail what weather will be like.”

The closer you get to the actual event, the more predictable the outcome.

Though the models have improved substantially over time, even within those two weeks there are big limitations.

The limits to modeling

We don’t completely understand how the weather works or all of the global processes that influence every little thing that happens. Our monitoring equipment around the planet is limited in the amount of data it can give us, as we don’t have probes covering every mile. And there’s a computational limit to just how much data we can process at once.

The models see the planet as a three dimensional grid of data, with the little squares extending from the surface, high up into the atmosphere.

A view of the L.A. River on Monday shows high water levels and a swift moving stream on a river that's often bone dry.

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Just consider for a second the scales of interactions — from clouds swirling over the Gulf of Alaska down to rain falling on Topanga canyon.

“Think about everything that’s smaller than a few kilometers. That’s clouds, cloud droplets. None of these things you can simulate accurately with the current computational power or any computational power we can foresee getting in a decades to come,” said Schneider.

The more localized the projection, the more accurate the forecast, but the higher the computational cost.

Because of that cost, there are limits to how granular the models can get. Which is why there are inaccuracies when forecasting down to a local level, especially in a place like Southern California, which has wildly varied terrain that results in 20 degree temperature differences just a few miles apart.

Mudflows inundate a street in Beverly Hills.

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Should you take forecasts seriously?

Yes. With the understanding that even if you get a warning from the National Weather Service about a hazard like a flash flood, you may go through a whole lot of prep that doesn’t actually need to be used.

At the end of the day though, on the off chance that an extreme scenario does occur, it’s worth getting your stuff together.

I’d rather be disappointed than unprepared and caught off guard.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
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Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.