Big Storms Yesterday in Southern California

0100 UTC Regional Radar 6 September 2009 from NCAR RAP

As the air mass was drying from the west and early convection seemed to be capped, I thought that yesterday was going to be a down day in Southern California, boy was I wrong. Yesterday afternoon brought the most impressive line of cumulonimbus that I have ever seen. Outflows from Colorado River Valley storms generated severe storms when they hit the eastern side of the Peninsular Range late in the afternoon. After not paying too much attention to what was going on I looked out about 5pm to see one massive storm lined up immediately adjacent to another, stretching as far as the eye could see across the eastern horizon, from Riverside County down toward the Gulf of California.

I hopped in my car and drove east along I-8. When I got closer to the CBs they were spectacular: massive, with brilliantly lit hail streaks coming down their west side. The NWS said that they were topping out at 60,000 feet and radar was indicating 3" hail. I took some photos from the freeway exit at Mt. Laguna, then raced farther along I-8, and made a tactical error that prevented me from getting a spectacular photo. The freeway heads south for a while past Mt. Laguna, so it wasn't gaining on the storms. Then once it comes out of a valley and turns east again, there is an exit which comes up pretty suddenly, and I just planned on staying the freeway a bit farther. That's when I looked to the north and saw something spectacular: not just the massive brilliantly lit west side of the anvils, but also a haboob which was being turbulently driven up the east side of Mt. Laguna. This dust cloud, which was no doubt generated on the desert floor, had been pushed up the 4000' eastern escarpment of the Peninsular Range and was now moving west across the ridges and valleys of the mountains, and when I saw it was climbing the east side of 6000' Mt. Laguna. This would have been an amazing photo, but unfortunately I was still going 75mph east on the freeway, with no exits for 10 miles. After a couple miles we drove into the dust cloud, visibility dropped below one half mile, and the fun was over.

Jim Means

Alpine, CA