Windy Storm Pummeled San Diego County

I am Maureen Cavanaugh and it is Monday, February 1. There is a lot of cleaning up to do in San Diego after yesterdays went and rain. The wind gusts were clock at 50 miles per hour and higher. They stopped play at the Torrey Pines golf tournament and tragically led to the death of one woman in Pacific Beach when a tree fell on her car. Joining the is Alex Padilla meteorologist with the national weather service in San Diego. Thank you for having me. We all know about El Niño's influence in bringing these waves of storms to San Diego. But what made this storm so when the? This particular storm was really intense. Not just a short duration of wind, we had about 12 hours of wind Sunday afternoon all the way through just before sunrise this morning. During that time period on the coast of San Diego we saw widespread wind gusts of 42 as high as 60 miles per hour. Whenever you start getting wins over 50 miles per hour, it becomes real dangerous. It is unpredictable about what is going to give -- what poll will break or what tree will snap. It becomes dangerous -- even more so at night. As we saw yesterday it can be dangerous in the afternoon. Where were the strongest gusts? The strongest gusts we saw were anywhere from -- where we focused around 60 miles per hour, Mission Beach, 69 miles per hour, we sold us even and Delmar along the coast of 50 now and now spread our. So the strongest gusts were around 60 miles per hour Did the soaking rain that we got earlier in January contribute to the falling trees and some of the other damage we saw? I don't think so. A lot of the rain we saw in January at about two weeks of dry weather and things were able to recover and get back closer to normal. When you do have a lot of rain it does impact, it makes the leaves heavy and wet. The tree can be more susceptible to fall over. The type of wind we saw yesterday as evidenced by windows that were broken, when you hit 60 miles per hour, it is not a magic number. You don't really need wet conditions. A lot of things can start breaking at that speed. What did make the storm when the? These wins came from the Pacific Ocean, the same thing that is creating our high surf and the same gesturing that created all the wins we solve and rains we saw it in early January. This particular storm took a path right towards northern Baja region and California. This is the situation where typically these storms, Alex you cut out for a minute. So you are telling us the storms typically -- They typically affect the Pacific Northwest or in Washington. In this case the storm literally stared southward across Southern California and northern Mexico. We were right in the past of the brunt of the storm in terms of the strong winds. This type of storm we don't see every year. It is more like a 5 to 10 your storm. We can attribute El Niño to allowing this storm to go so far south. February is typically one of San Diego's wettest months. Are you seeing more storm patterns team created and may be headed our way? Right now it looks like we will be able to recover nicely from the storm. We have about seven days of beautiful slowly warming in fact becoming very warm by the end of this week kind of weather. All the way until Super Bowl weekend. We can plan for very nice weather and light winds and warm conditions. The next change -- chance for rain is going to set up around the 11th or 12th of February. It does not look to be heavy or have strong winds at this time. Towards the end of the month or the middle of the month, the 18th or 19th is our first chance for significant storms in terms of wins and rain. So we have at least a week to 10 days to dry out to recover. I've been speaking with Alex Padilla, thank you.