Expect June Gloom to leave . . . in about 20 years

NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER

June is bustin' out all over . . . somewhere. But here in Santa Barbara, the cool, cloudy, drizzling days march by in drab succession.

Keep those sweaters handy, researchers say, because this summer the June Gloom may linger until August. And don't bother to buy a new bathing suit. According to a new report from Cal State Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, residents from the Central Coast to San Diego can expect a Bummer Summer Deluxe every year until 2023.

"We're going to have to live with this fog and low clouds for quite awhile," said Steve LaDochy, a Cal State geographer. "There's going to be a lot of variability. But overall, the low clouds will be lingering later into the summer for the next 20 years."

The coast of California is the third foggiest area in the United States, after New England and the Northwest. Every spring here, the cool air that lies just off the coast -- basically, a thick layer of clouds -- is drawn inland by warm air rising in the interior.

Mr. LaDochy and Bill Patzert, a climatologist at CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, studied 50 years of fog data from LAX, the Long Beach airport and the Los Angeles Civic Center and found that it corresponded closely with long-term changes in ocean temperatures.

The waters of the Pacific Ocean shift from warm to cool and back to warm again every 50 years, as if someone were flicking a switch off and on. After the wet winter of 1997-98, ocean temperatures off the coast of California dropped 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, announcing the start of a 25-year-long cycle of cooler waters.

Mr. LaDochy and Mr. Patzert found that from the 1950s to the early 1970s -- the last cool period -- there were 40 days of heavy fog per year in the Los Angeles area. By contrast, during the 1980s and 1990s, when the ocean was warmer, the number of days of dense fog dropped to 20 per year.

Now that the ocean is cooler again, the researchers say, the marine layer, as the clouds are euphemistically called, is back with a vengeance. It moves in early in the day and sticks around until the evening.

Each 25-year ocean cycle also has its El Ninos and La Ninas, short-lived climate events that pack their biggest punch in the tropics.

During a warm ocean cycle, El Nino events are stronger and more common. They bring wetter winters, warmer summers and less fog, the researchers found. When the ocean is colder, La Nina events are more common. They bring drier winters, colder summers -- and more fog.

Luckily, there will be exceptions, Mr. LaDochy said, such as an occasional heat wave. This past winter, he said, was an example of another exception -- a weak El Nino in a cool ocean cycle. It brought average to above-average rainfall to Southern California after three dry years.

Next winter is bound to be drier, the researchers said. For the next two decades, they said, there will be more dry years than wet years.

"We're switching from a wimpy El Nino of the past winter to something that looks more like La Ni–a, the Diva of Drought, for the West," Mr. Patzert said. "The little normal rainfall we had -- that was just to green everything up. I think we're definitely looking at a big fire season here.

"The bummer summer, the fire danger, the drought in the West. . . . Right now we're shivering and shaking, but we've got bigger problems out there."