Darby Spills More Rain on L.A. : Weather: Former hurricane packs weak punch but sets record nonetheless. Continued drizzle is forecast.

The persistent remains of former Hurricane Darby continued to dampen Southern California on Sunday, scattering light showers throughout the area and bringing the promise of more wet weather today and Tuesday.

Although the 0.05 of an inch that fell at the Los Angeles Civic Center during the day was hardly a deluge, it set a record for the date, pushing the total for the rainfall season--which began on July 1--to 0.08.

To get an idea of how unusual that is, the record for the date had been a trace and the average season’s total by July 12 is 0.00.

Other rainfall amounts recorded on Sunday in Southern California included .12 of an inch in La Canada Flintridge and Canoga Park, .14 in Santa Barbara and .40 at Mt. Wilson.

The sporadic showers of the last week are the remnants of a powerful storm system that moved steadily up the west coasts of Central America, Mexico and the United States. While this one stayed well out to sea, causing little damage, others like it have turned inland with a destructive fury that has earned them the name, El Cordonazo de San Francisco --the Lash of St. Francis--because they most often occur in Mexico around the feast of St. Francis on Oct. 4.

Storms such as Darby are creatures of the sea, born over the ocean when some slight swirl in the atmosphere sets a collection of small rain systems rotating around a common center, said meteorologist Richard A. Keen, who wrote about the phenomena in his book, “Skywatch,” a guide to the weather of the western United States.

Drawing their energy from the warm waters of the tropics, these rotating systems begin to spin faster and faster, earning classification as tropical storms when their winds exceed 39 m.p.h. and achieving full-fledged hurricane status when their winds reach 74 m.p.h.

Like Darby, most hurricanes born off the west coast of Central America tend to move north and west, following the prevailing flow of the trade winds.

Because there are few islands and relatively little shipping traffic in this quarter of the world, the extent of these storms was little appreciated until weather satellites began dotting the skies in the 1960s, Keen wrote. It was only then, he said, that this Eastern Pacific hurricane track was recognized as the second-busiest in the world, trailing only that of the Western Pacific.

As the Eastern Pacific hurricanes move north, the waters over which they pass get progressively cooler, and the storms begin to diminish in intensity. That is what happened to Darby, which was downgraded to a tropical storm last Tuesday and to an even less awesome ranking--that of a tropical depression--on Thursday.

Most such storms just fizzle into nothingness somewhere between here and Hawaii.

But Darby got far enough north to start picking up the eastbound winds that blow above Latitude 30 degrees, which crosses the coast about 175 miles south of San Diego. These winds halted the storm’s westward movement, and there it has been sitting, stalled about 250 miles off the Southern California coast, pumping a steady flow of warm, humid air inland.

Sometimes the winds blowing toward the coast are strong enough to push such storms inland over northwestern Mexico and Southern California, causing considerably heavier rain and winds than the Southland has been getting during the past week.

Such storms have repeatedly wreaked havoc among the fishing fleets of Baja California.

More than 50 years ago, a former hurricane came onshore in the Los Angeles area while packing gale-force power.

That was on Sept. 25, 1939, when a 2-week-old Cordonazo slammed into the Orange County coast with winds of more than 50 m.p.h., smashing boats, tearing off roofs, downing power lines and killing at least 45 people. Almost 5 1/2 inches of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles that day, with more than 13 inches recorded at Mt. Wilson.

Darby has been a pale imitation of that, but it has hung around for almost a week now, and forecasters say it will hang around a while longer.

“The weather’s not going to change a whole lot,” Steve Burback, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said Sunday night.

“There’ll be light rain and drizzle--nothing heavy--on Monday, with more of the same on Tuesday,” he said. “The rain will be a little spottier on Tuesday, but it will stay humid, and there’ll be no real clearing until Wednesday, and maybe not until Thursday.”

Burback said temperatures will remain about the same, too, with highs in the upper 70s and 80s after overnight lows in the mid- to upper 60s.

Humidity at the Civic Center ranged between a damp 88% and a positively soggy 100% on Sunday. The high temperature was 76 degrees, after an overnight low of 68.