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Get Ready For A Mid-Winter Heat Wave And Santa Ana Winds
Might as well hit the beach. (Photo by Juliet Bennett Rylah/LAist)
Southern California is in for a February heat wave, as temperatures are expected to reach nearly 90 degrees over the next few days.According to the L.A. Times, San Diego and Lake Forest reached 81 degrees on Friday, making them tied for the warmest places in the U.S. for the day.
But that's just a precursor to even hotter temperatures later this week. Forecasts from the National Weather Service indicate that Sunday's highs will be around 83 degrees, while Monday and Tuesday will be the warmest days, with highs up to 86 degrees.
And with warm winter weather (say that three times fast) often comes the ominous Santa Ana winds, which the NWS says could reach 50 mph in the mountains and 45 mph in the valleys. While the slew of El Niño-related storms in January has helped to somewhat reduce the threat of wildfires, conditions over the next couple of days will be particularly windy, hot, and dry: not good.
Bad news for drought stricken southern California. Santa Ana conditions with elevated fire danger expected through...
Posted by US National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard on Thursday, February 4, 2016
We're reminded of this passage about the demonic Santa Anas Joan Didion captured in her essay Los Angeles Notebook:
The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. ...[T]he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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