Southern California braces for another September heat wave, with temperatures in excess of 100 degrees on Wednesday!
Tucked between the Los Angeles Harbor and Los Angeles International Airport, the L.A.-area has to endure a combination of dry, wet and hot, all year round.
As I write this, the air is cool and pleasant, with a wind chill from the bay in the low 20s. By my next door neighbor’s back gate, temperatures are expected to reach the high 70s during the afternoon.
So, what does this mean for our families, our kids, our pets, our pets, and us?
This will be the 5th consecutive year that we have endured these types of hot days, from July through September.
We have always had at least one day each month when we were told “it’s summer now” and had to adjust our thinking towards the hot days. We live in the mountains and when all the summer heat washes down from the high peaks, it can really suck the life out of our valley.
Even when those temperatures are really, really high, we need to remember that it all translates into an extremely high chance for a thunderstorm. We live directly east of the San Fernando Valley, which has to contend with some pretty bad thunderstorm weather, at times. In the heat and humidity, there is going to be some fun things thrown at us from both the Santa Anas, which usually arrive in late August, and the other two big storms coming up in October and early November.
I am reminded of a story I remember from childhood of how we lived in the desert, and my mother woke us up at the crack of dawn to watch the morning storms rolling in to begin another hot day. She was really quite upset and worried about us, so I offered to give her a ride to work in the morning and take her places.
She just smiled at me as she left and said “Don’t worry about me, it is the same on the other side of the L.A. valley.”
The same weather pattern and temperature pattern (a few days of cool and dry followed by a few