Sunshine Rains on Weather Writer’s Parade : Climate: Finding gloom on such a beautiful day requires a prowl of the deepest, darkest, dankest recesses of Los Angeles.

For a weather writer, Friday was a disaster.

No drenching rain squalls, no blistering heat, no crop-destroying freeze, no parching drought.

The weather was virtually perfect. Even worse, the weekend forecast called for more of the same.

But the assignment was typical for a quiet Friday: Tell them all that anyhow.

For a reporter who has written more than 250 weather stories over the last eight years, there are a couple of familiar fallback positions on a day like Friday.

You can go to the beach, collar some tourist from Minnesota and get him to tell you how much nicer it is here than back there at this time of year. It’s something that most readers know, but we Southern Californians need a little reassurance these days.

You can go to the park, find some young mother with a cute kid or two, and get her to tell you how glad she is to be in the glorious outdoors instead of being cooped up in some dismal office. Editors like photos of cute kids.

We did something different Friday. We checked out some of those dismal offices.

The Los Angeles County archives seemed like a good place to start. It’s the sort of place that could be used as a setting for “Les Miserables.”

The archives are subterranean, buried three grim levels beneath the lush gardens outside the County Hall of Administration. To get to the archives, this reporter and a photographer clumped down a long, dank, echoing tunnel and descended a couple of flights of dimly lit stairs--the steel-and-concrete kind found in federal prisons and public parking structures.

There, in a gray concrete cavern filled with stacks of faded brown cardboard boxes, we found Raul Hermosillo, seated at a shabby little brown desk decorated with pictures of Beavis and Butt-head.

“This is the bottom,” the 25-year-old file clerk said matter-of-factly as he gazed out at his dreary world. “But it’s quiet. It’s peaceful. I kind of like it down here.”

Hermosillo admitted, however, that he sometimes wonders what the weather is like “up there.”

“Sometimes I go up there on my lunch break,” he said. “When you see that bright sun, it really makes you blink.”

At the records counter one floor above Hermosillo, clerks Valerie Andrade, 21, and Isabel Nercho, 29, were trying to brighten things up with a tiny Christmas tree. It didn’t help much.

“People get moody down here,” Nercho said.

Over at 6th and Wall streets, Officer Carla Allen was working the reception desk at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division station. Designed in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, the station was built as a fortress. One entrance, hidden behind a wall that screens out the sunlight. No windows.

“It would be nice if there were windows, but we’re on Skid Row, so the scenery isn’t that great,” Allen said. “Instead, what I can look at is some plaques on the walls, or some pictures of officers who have died in the line of duty, or the flag. We have a great big American flag.”

For Rich Burke, an employee of the Union Ice Co., the view during the day is more likely to be stacks of frozen chickens, or boxes of frozen string beans.

To Burke, a marketing director whose part-time “office” is a 150,00O-square-foot deep-freeze in the City of Commerce, “it doesn’t much matter what the weather is like outside.”

“It’s like the winter in Chicago in there,” he said with a shudder. “It’s dark. It’s bitter cold. It’s always dreary in there. We have to wear insulated coats and pants, heavy gloves and hats. We dress like Eskimos.”

More familiar sources at the National Weather Service and WeatherData Inc., said that warm, mostly sunny weather would continue through the weekend. And they concluded that Friday was a really nice day in Los Angeles, with moderate breezes, clear skies and a Civic Center high of 83 degrees.

That conclusion was based on instrument readings, not on personal observation.

The National Weather Service office that provides information about Los Angeles weather is in Oxnard. The offices of WeatherData Inc. are in Wichita, Kan.