For Now, No Bright Prospects : Mornings, the Sun’ll Be Under a Cover

Under cloudy skies Monday, Charlotte Yates was enjoying a stroll along the Newport Pier.

Orange County’s beaches are wonderful, Yates said, but the weather is something else again.

“Terrible!” said Yates, a Denver bookkeeper who was wearing long pants and a long-sleeved windbreaker for her outing by the sea. “I want to go to the beach and sit out, but it’s so cold!”

By noon, though, the sun had slowly begun edging through the overcast skies.

But, of course, it’s May--and, for coastal communities from Seattle to San Diego, that means the familiar routine of low clouds in the morning, sun in the afternoon. “May-June syndrome,” some call it. Or sometimes simply “June gloom.”

The daily morning cloud cover is an annual seasonal trend that can begin as early as April but that generally lifts in July, although it can occur at other times of the year as well, climate experts say.

For a minority of people, UC Irvine biochemist Edward DeMet says, a lack of sunshine can affect mood, causing some to feel glum or, for a few, even clinically depressed.

But at the pier Monday, the overcast weather was evoking a mixed response. A few visitors such as Yates were not pleased to see the clouds, but most other beach-goers, including several local fishermen, said they were enjoying a cool--and relatively uncrowded--day by the ocean.

“It’s real nice. It’s much better than working in July” or later in the summer, when the cloud cover would be gone but the workday would be blazing hot, said Bill Grgurich, 57, a former high school math teacher who now works full-time as a fisherman, catching cod and sea trout from a wooden dory.

Brian Moore, a 35-year-old Garden Grove resident who had ridden his bicycle from home to the beach, agreed. “I like the weather,” he said. “It keeps you cool. And too much sun’s not good for you.”

Rick Dittmann, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times, says the cloudy weather “is just typical spring-summer weather for most of the West from Washington down to San Diego.”

The degree of cloudiness depends on the “intensification” of an onshore wind-flow pattern of westerly winds moving cooler air from the ocean onto the coast, Dittmann said.

This situation can “happen any time of the year,” Dittmann said, but it is likely to happen in spring and early summer as the temperatures over the Western United States--Nevada, the deserts and other inland areas of Southern California--begin to heat up.

As the Earth heats up, Dittmann said, low pressure is created at the surface. The water temperature just off the coast, meanwhile, remains quite cold because of water flow from the Gulf of Alaska, and so creates its own high pressure. The cold air over the colder water causes low clouds and fog to develop, Dittmann said. The wind blowing from the ocean to the interior brings that marine layer into the coastal communities and inland.

Later in the summer, “it gets so warm over San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Anaheim that low clouds only make it in at night, and the (daytime) heat kind of evaporates them,” he said.

But in May or June, as the marine layer deepens to 4,000 or 5,000 feet at times, “the land is not warm enough to burn off” the clouds and if a weather pattern “is not favorable,” the clouds can hang around for two weeks,” Dittmann said.

Right now, he predicted, “the next several days are going to be quite cloudy” in Southern California because of such a pattern.

Southern California’s cloudy weather may have an effect, albeit a “minimal” one, on the mood of some residents, said Edward DeMet, a biochemist who is an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the UCI School of Medicine.

DeMet does research on “seasonal affective disorder,” a form of clinical depression that is associated with either sunlight or a lack of sunlight. Some people, he noted, might have a “subclinical depression,” that is, a down feeling that does not reach the severity of a clinical depression.

About 1% of the U.S. population suffers from seasonal affective disorder, DeMet said. He said, however, that there are two schools of thought on how the disorder is triggered: some scientists say it relates to how much light a person gets, and others suggest that a person’s sensitivity to light is the cause.

DeMet noted that if there is cloudy weather for just “one or two days, it’s not going to depress people. But if you have it for a long period, there are certainly people who are going to be susceptible.”

Speaking personally, the biochemist said: “I enjoy this time of year, not so much because of the sunlight but because of the weather. It’s not hot like the summer and not cold like the winter. It’s a pleasant time of year.”

Gloomy Harbinger

In Southern California, overcast skies and morning fog are nature’s paradoxical way of announcing that summer is almost here. The unpostcard like conditions are created when temperatures begin to climb and warm, moist air near the ground rises to meet cool dry air at higher altitudes. The two layers meet, forming overcast skies and fog.

1. Dry, cool air offshore is forced down by a high-pressure system.

2. As temperatures begin to rise, warm, moist air near the ground rises.

3. The two layers meet, forming fog and overcast skies.

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times

Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography