Quick Take:
Meteorologists weigh in on the extreme winds that whipped through the county last week. They can’t say if winds topping 90 miles per hour winds measured at the small craft harbor are record-setting or even entirely accurate. Meanwhile, another weather system is heading toward the area, bringing 3 to 4 inches of rain between Tuesday night and Monday morning.
Santa Cruz County is about to have another wet holiday, following two storm systems that rolled through the region over Christmas week.
Meanwhile, that eye-popping wind measurement at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor on Christmas Eve — topping 90 mph — is a topic for discussion among weather nerds and professionals alike.
“That’s unbelievable,” said Harbormaster Blake Anderson, adding that the harbor managed to escape any serious infrastructure damage. “Just over my time there in the last 16 or 17 years, there’s maybe been a couple times where we’ve gotten close to 70 [mph] or just over.”
National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Merchant could not say whether that was the strongest wind ever recorded in the county, because the weather stations in the area aren’t “robust” near the coast. But he said a measurement like that is “pretty impressive and rare.”
“We were seeing tornado warnings and severe thunderstorm warnings,” he said. “That’s usually Tornado Alley type stuff, not coastal California.”
Jan Null, Half Moon Bay-based meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services, said some regions also have more instrumentation than they used to, which brings awareness to weather conditions that have always been present, but not easily observed. He said that Pacific Gas and Electric installed 1,500 weather stations in the windiest spots around Northern and Central California to monitor the weather following the severe 2017 fires.
“So we are seeing a lot of higher values at those sites where we never had instrumentation,” he said.
When asked if the increasing amount of serious storms over the past few years, and winds that potentially topped 90 mph, can be attributed to climate change, Merchant said it’s both out of his purview and difficult to make a determination regarding one specific weather event.
Null also said it’s impossible to attribute one severe weather event to climate change, but did not deny that the gusts were intense. (He also said he isn’t entirely sold on the accuracy of a wind measurement in the low-90s at the harbor.)
“Every weather event now has climate change in its DNA,” he said. “If you look at this decade versus, let’s say, the 90s, there are probably more events that are toward the extreme end. But we’re looking at a really small sample size.”
Merchant told Lookout Monday that the storm system heading towards the county is likely to make landfall Tuesday night and stick around through the weekend until early Monday. The coastal ranges and higher elevations in the county are expected to receive 3 to 4 inches of rain from this storm, which Merchant described as “manageable.”
“This is going to be spread out over a pretty decent amount of time,” he said. “You may see some small rises in some of the streams, but otherwise, you should be OK.”
However, Merchant added that the system will coincide with king tides — unusually high tides that occur several times each year. Because of this, NWS has issued a coastal flood advisory from 5 a.m. on Wednesday until 2 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 4.
Merchant said winds are predicted to be significantly more mild than last week. He said that the county will likely see the strongest winds on Friday night, but there is only a 50% chance that gusts exceed 25 miles per hour, and an even lower probability that they exceed 40 miles per hour.