The California Drought Finally Explained With Both Upper And Lower Levels Of Atmosphere To Blame

(TheWeatherSpace.com) – A record number of Santa Ana Wind Products this season has prompted for the 2013 drought to continue even now, with no rain in sight.  The mechanism behind it has been modeled and the discovery of two sections of the atmosphere to blame has come out.

The graphic above is pretty tough to read but I’ll go across it in steps below …

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Step 1:  The Big “H” in the Pacific is the Northeastern Pacific Ridge.  This has been responsible for carving an Eastern Canada Low and deep trough for arctic air shows east of the Rocky Mountains.  This has been the normal this entire season.  These are up around 18,000 feet, so considered the mid to upper levels of the atmosphere.

Step 2:  The pinkish shade is the upper jet stream pattern as a result of Step 1.  What happens is storms come up and around, into the Pacific Northwest, finally diving into Utah and exiting through Texas off to the Eastern United States.  This pattern is the inside slider storm pattern.  What happens is the cold front moves southeast through Idaho and Northern Nevada.  This front ‘pushes’ air southward through Nevada.  The rotation of the planet makes the winds turn westward and jet through the passes and canyons of California, which is known as the Offshore Flow and many other wind names like Santa Ana Winds.  These are low level winds, below 1,000 feet.

Step 3:  Because these are low level winds, the low level moisture content gets shoved westward, hundreds of miles from California.  This creates a mine-field of dry air west of California.  Again, because of the rotation of the Earth, the wind curls northward in the low levels, creating two separate surface level high pressure zones … as noted by the two blue H’s.  High pressure sinks, so anything in that area is sinking, not rising .. .thus drying the area out further.

Step 4:  The little red L is where moisture near Hawaii creates some storm activity.  Storm fronts pick of moisture as the storm develops under the ridge, which is very common for them to do so.  This front of moisture moves eastward, giving California a hope for rainfall.  But remember Step 3?  The mine-field for moisture is dry-air.  Just as Hurricane Season this year was weaker because of the dry Saharan Desert air from Africa … this is similar to our season in California.  The moisture streaming into the dry air gets taken over, sinks, and converted into dry air, therefore the clash of the two air-masses prevents any advancing moisture from the west to make it to California.

This mechanism is like gears on a clock.  Two air-masses rotating opposite directions, with neither letting up.  This revolving is keeping the surface highs west of California going as the offshore flow continues.  This type of pattern is stuck for a long time … and I must say it is pretty rare to see it stick this long.

When can it break?  I do not know … but what I do know is that when we get rid of the offshore flow for at least 2 weeks … the air west of here will be moist enough to allow fronts to make it this way.  As of now every single front that attempts that mine-field of dry-air … gets torn apart and converted to dry air…