Temperatures are finally getting back to normal in San Diego after a week of record heat and Santa Ana winds.
Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s San Diego office, said Santa Ana winds are rare for May, but that doesn’t mean they never occur.
“If you go back to last year in early May, we had a Santa Ana then in May of 2013. It didn’t affect San Diego County, it affected our neighbors up east of Riverside, where they had fires last year,” Tardy said.
Santa Ana winds, high temperatures and the ongoing drought all contributed to last week’s wildfires in the county. Tardy says his family and neighbors in Carlsbad were ready to leave their homes at a moment’s notice.
“Some of my kids’ school teachers had the fire burn up to their door step, literally, and had to run, grab a backpack, and run. We had a suitcase ready to go at our house, but we never left. We had the car turned around and ready to go,” Tardy said.
Tardy said nearly half of a dozen weather records were broken in San Diego County during last week’s heat wave.
“We were breaking records by 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning, both days – 94 one day, 97 on Thursday. Incredible records even for a coastal location. Inland it was going over 100 by 1 o’clock,” Tardy said.
Tardy predicts cooler weather this week with a slight warming trend for the weekend, but nothing extreme.
The biggest challenge facing the region is the drought, Tardy said. He said three years of drought is like missing an entire season of rain.
“We could see this again. We can’t predict when fires start, but we could easily see conditions again. It’s going to be a long summer and fall,” Tardy said.
Tardy says even predictions of an El Niño bringing more rain and some relief to California later this year are premature, because it would take a significant amount of rain to make a dent in the drought.
