The anguish of spring

Posted on | March 26, 2010 | No Comments

National Weather Service Graphical Forecast detail for Los Angeles, CA, March 31, 2010 as issued on March 26, 2010. Click on the map to be taken to the interactive tool.

Updated 4/1/2010. Earlier this week, this site carried an explanation of why what was supposed to be a wetter than normal year turned out to be a slightly drier one in Southern California. Yet almost immediately meteorologists spotted what may be our last rain of the season. Ken Clark has a chatty explanation on AccuWeather. For those whose hearts only beat faster when presented with cold hard graphics, a similar prediction may be found at NOAA’s Digital Forecast Database. Click on your region, then on the day in the Probability of Precipitation panel. For Los Angeles, the screen tops 50% chance of rain for the evening of Wednesday, March 31st.

Will it come? The anguish of spring in an arid region again brings to mind a passage from Luis Bunuel’s autobiography “My Last Breath” about growing up in Aragon, whose mediterranean climate is almost identical to that of Los Angeles: “Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly: ‘Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.'”

Update, April Fools Day, 2010: Less than .01 inch of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles between midnight and 5am.

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