Some Call the Wind Sharki, or Willy-willy, or maybe Elephantra; SoCals Call it Bad News

Reader Ed Marelius sent us this set of portraits, before and after, of his brave little weather station, which was set right in the middle of the Southern California firestorm. “Amazingly,” Ed wrote, “the temperature did not go up that much. It was about 85ºF or so. The wind out of the east was pretty strong (25mph gusts), going right to left in the picture, so I'm guessing the wind kept the temperature from soaring. The burned area is only about 30 feet or so from the ISS. The brush in the foreground is in my yard. We'd soaked it pretty well before the fire came through.” Luckily, Ed’s home survived as well.

Wind, the simple movement of air from high to low pressure that we weather nuts love, answers to a long list of names, depending on where the wind-blown observer lives. A Warm Braw can be felt in the Schouten Islands north of New Guinea. You could get violently tossed around by a Pampero in Southern Argentina, and you might feel squeamish about a Squamish in the fjords of British Columbia.

But in southern California, at least lately, they’ve been calling the wind a few names we can’t print here. Every southern Californian knows about the Santa Ana winds: the warm, dry northeastern winds that come barreling down through the canyons of Los Angeles every year around this time. But this year, the Santa Anas were a major player in the devastating fires that took hundreds of homes and many lives, and displaced thousands. These fast moving winds (to be a Santa Ana, wind speed must be at least 25 knots) made fighting the fires almost impossible, whipping the flames into a furious crescent that filled the air with smoke that was visible from space.

Santa Anas are a fact of life in Southern California. At best they stir up pollen and exacerbate allergies, at worst, well, all you had to do was turn on the news in October to see how these winds were helping fuel the horrific wildfires that burned an area the size of Rhode Island.

Most Santa Anas are born far from their namesake, the Santa Ana Canyon southeast of Los Angeles. They are conceived over the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain ranges, in Utah, Nevada and Idaho. The typical Santa Ana starts out as an area of high pressure there above the dry plateau. In the Northern Hemisphere, air flows clockwise around a high pressure system. This clockwise rotation leads to winds in the area south of the high pressure area that blow toward the lower pressure area off shore. As the air rolls downhill toward the Los Angeles basin and the Pacific, it becomes compressed, which leads to warming – at a rate of 5º F per 1,000 feet. The air started out dry, and the compressional heating drops the humidity even more – sometimes to 20%.

When that dry, warm air is channeled through the narrow canyons and passes in the coastal mountains, it picks up speed and takes on its name. Typical speeds are 30 to 40 knots (35 - 45 mph), with gusts as high as 60 (70 mph). The canyons twist and turn, narrow and widen, creating eddies and swirls of warm air that can go from peaceful to furious in a few moments. Add a flame to feed, and you’ve got highly dangerous, unpredictable, and hard-to-battle wildfires. The fire’s heat adds to the effect by causing the air to rise and creating even more gusts. It’s a fire-fighter’s nightmare.

This year’s firestorm was as bad as it gets, but things might be even worse for the southlanders if not for the cool, moist air that blows in from the ocean and often mediates the Santa Anas. This year the sea breezes came too little, and much too late.

In our part of California, the Bay Area, we often see a similar sort of wind that flows from high pressure areas over Nevada down through our canyons toward the Pacific. We call the wind Diablo. (It means “devil” in Spanish – but we think of our beautiful Mount Diablo.) Even further up the Pacific coast, the Chinooks flow down from the Rocky Mountains in a manner very similar to the Santa Anas.

We’d love to hear what the wind is called where you live, because there are some great wind monikers out there. (A fascinating list of names can be found on our favorite meteorologist, Jan Null’s Golden Gate Weather Service website.) This year we Californians just wished we could call them off.

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