Watch out for more thunderstorms

WEATHER TIDBITS

I can’t remember such a long run of beautiful sunrises without even a

touch of fog or low overcast.

Your Tidbitter dot com got it right again. Calling for a hot

tropical summer with minimal gloom and lots of storms in the parched

mountains and deserts.

The nights have been 70-degrees plus and the days have been mid to

high 80s.

Last August we couldn’t buy a sunny day or a balmy night. Now

we’ve had a surplus of both.

And it’s looking like another wave of monsoonal moisture is

heading our way from the east and southeast.

I’m calling for more thunderstorm activity here in Laguna before

August is finished.

Could this be the second year in a row where we didn’t pull off

the annual Brooks Street Surf Classic?

The Eastern Pacific Tropics aren’t cooperating at all -- eight

storms, not one making even category one hurricane and three not even

making tropical storm status. The upper-level winds are so strong

they continue to shear the tops off the thunderstorm clusters, or

they hit colder than normal waters, or they move straight west. It’s

just not our year!

And southern hemisphere swells just don’t make it at Brooks Street

and we’re not even getting more than one or two days of 3 to 4 feet.

Out main source of surf this summer has been the northwest wind

swell, which is great at Thalia Reef, lots of fun days with

three-foot peelers.

But we’d all like to see some red flag bomber days, where the

whole ocean is moving around.

August water temperatures on a graph have resembled the Dow Jones

-- one day it’s up, next day it’s down. Then it creeps up to 68

degrees, then the stinkin’ westerlies (The Enemy) blow a gale in the

afternoon, next morning it’s 61 degrees.

We need three days straight of south winds to vault it back over

70 degrees. The average water temperature in July was 71.6 degrees.

The average water temperature so far in August -- 64.7 degrees.

Who’d a thought?!

It’s just the system of checks and balances.

The best part is no gloom!

I see an even hotter September and October with frequent Santanas

and then it’ll turn cold by November -- and snow flurries in

December.

Stay tuned!

* DENNIS McTIGHE is a Laguna Beach resident. He earned a

bachelor’s in earth sciences from UCSD and was a U.S. Air Force

weather forecaster at Hickman Air Force Base, Hawaii.