Santa Ana Winds Give Rides to Smoke Plume and Ladybugs

Legions of ladybugs lifted out of the Laguna Mountains and uncharacteristically bailed out over the beach Wednesday as unseasonable Santa Ana winds continued to deliver great weather to San Diego County.

But temperatures will cool slightly over the next couple of days, and a weeklong series of back-to-back storms will arrive late Sunday or Monday, the National Weather Service said.

“The sun worshipers will think fondly of (today). We hope everyone enjoyed it, because the rain is coming,” meteorologist Wilbur Shigehara said.

We’ll get to that later.

Temperatures on Wednesday loitered in the 80s throughout the county, with the Santa Anas delivering warmer temperatures to coastal areas than in the desert. The mercury hit 88 in National City, tying it with Monrovia for the highest temperature in the nation. It was 86 in Oceanside and 84 at Lindbergh Field, while Borrego Springs topped out at 83.

In fact, San Diego’s high Wednesday, while 3 degrees shy of the record for a Feb. 26, would have been a record-setter had it occurred Tuesday or today, Shigehara said.

About the only downside to Wednesday’s Santa Ana condition was a wind-fanned fire that spread across more than 350 acres near Rainbow, and a wind-blamed power outage in Pala that left several thousand customers without power for about 30 minutes during the noon hour, authorities said.

The Rainbow fire began when a resident burning debris lost control of the fire about 10:30 a.m. and it spread through steep, rocky terrain along Rice Canyon Road north of California 76, California Department of Forestry spokeswoman Carol Stein said.

A large plume of smoke from the blaze drifted across Interstate 15 and into Fallbrook.

About 300 firefighters from the CDF, the U.S. Forest Service, the North County Inland Fire Protection District and other municipal fire departments were expected to have the fire encircled early today, Stein said.

The fire neither caused any injuries nor damaged any structures.

A more curious effect of the unseasonable temperatures and winds off the desert was the appearance of countless ladybugs that began showing up earlier in the week along the coastline.

“They’re swarming all over our towers,” Oceanside Lifeguard Fred Armijo said. “Our Jeeps and towers are just covered with them.”

Lifeguard Matt Magro at Coronado’s Silver Strand State Beach said the ladybugs were landing on him even as he jogged along the shore.

“They’re all over the place, like when we get flies swarming over kelp during the summer,” he said.

A cross-county migration of ladybugs from the Laguna Mountains westward is a typical spring phenomenon, but the insects don’t normally carry so far west, said entomologist David Faulkner of the San Diego Natural History Museum.

For that, thank 40-m.p.h. gusts whipping across the top of the Lagunas.

“The Santa Anas are blowing them a little too far west,” Faulkner said. “It would be great if they got to the Coronado Islands or San Clemente Island, but they’ll probably drop out of the atmosphere before they get to Hawaii,” he said, laughing.

Ladybugs spend their winter months hiding under rocks and logs in the local mountains and typically are blown westward in the spring, where they’ll spend the next six months before their offspring are returned by on-shore winds back into the mountains, Faulkner said.

“Normally in the spring, they’ll go anywhere from 10 to 15 miles inland to the coast, by which time they’ll have burned up so many carbohydrates that they drop to the ground to feed on soft-body insects like aphids,” he said.

“This week, though, it’s coincided with the Santa Ana condition, which has thrown them off course. The winds are so strong, the ladybugs are blowing farther west. This time, when they come down to settle, a lot of them have got to start treading water.

“Kind of like invertebrate lemmings.”

There’s no danger that too many ladybugs--convergent ladybird beetles, actually--are being blown to sea, Faulkner said.

“It’s a huge mortality and it may give aphids a bit of a head start this year, but the ladybugs that survive will build up again very quickly.”

Wednesday may have been the last day for the ladybugs to book wholesale passage to the coastline. Forecaster Shigehara said the Santa Ana condition peaked Wednesday and will decrease today and Friday.

Compared to Wednesday’s highs, today’s highs should just about reach 80 degrees along the coast and settle in the low 80s in the inland valleys.

High-level wind patterns will slowly break up a massive high-pressure system over the western third of the United States, allowing a storm system forming now between Hawaii and the Gulf of Alaska to move toward California over the weekend, Shigehara said.

“It’ll start getting a little hazy on Friday, which will signal that the Santa Ana has come to an end, and on Saturday it will be partly cloudy, with increasing clouds on Sunday,” he said.

It was too early Wednesday to anticipate the strength of the approaching storm system, Shigehara said.

“These storms are born by El Nino and they fool us. They don’t look strong, but eventually they will bring substantial rain,” he said.

The first storm should be on San Diego by late Sunday or Monday, with a little break before a second storm arrives mid-week, he said. By week’s end, a third storm may follow suit into San Diego. Count on “significant rainfall,” Shigehara said.

“The El Nino is giving our computer modeling fits,” he said of attempts to accurately predict Pacific-bred weather systems.

But there was no confusing Wednesday’s weather around the county: great.

“It’s like summer out here,” said San Diego County Lifeguard Lt. Paul Dean at Solana Beach. “It’s an unseasonably large crowd. With year-round schools these days, you don’t know which kids ditched classes to be here.”