It’s Another Dreary May, Only Drearier

There are those who will tell you that Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer.

*

Not here. Not this year. Not ever, really.

While forecasters say this holiday weekend will be marginally better than most of the past month, it will still be pretty gloomy. Summer--which doesn’t begin officially until June 21--is still more than three weeks away, and forecasters say those wonderful, hot, sunny days that sound so attractive right now probably won’t start showing up with any regularity until after July 1.

Until then, it probably will be more of the numbingly familiar “morning low clouds and fog, giving way to partial afternoon clearing” that has been the pattern during May.

And this May has been even clammier than usual--in fact, it has been the coldest May in the last six years, which is as far back as such records are readily available.

The average temperature in Downtown Los Angeles so far this month--calculated by adding the highs and lows each day, dividing by two and averaging them--was 63.3 degrees. That compares with 65.1 last year, 68.9 in 1993, 69 in 1992, 63.9 in 1991 and 66.9 in 1990.

The comparisons aren’t startling, but they make their point--the weather is usually pretty dreary in May, and this May has been drearier than usual.

Robert Baruffaldi, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the culprits at the beginning of the month were a couple of cold, slow-moving storm systems from Alaska that camped over the state for the better part of two weeks.

While the storms dropped little measurable rain over Southern California, the attendant overcast kept temperatures several degrees below normal.

When the storms eventually moved out to the east, they were replaced by a trough of low pressure extending across Idaho, Utah, Nevada and northern Arizona. This low pressure pulled cool, moist marine air inland each night, blanketing the Los Angeles area with fog and low clouds that refused to burn off until midafternoon--if at all. Once again, the overcast kept temperatures low.

Baruffaldi said the pattern is typical for this time of year, with only a gradual warming and clearing trend expected over the next four weeks or so.

“June is usually like this,” he said. “It should start clearing a little earlier in the afternoon as the month progresses, and it will slowly get warmer, but don’t expect anything drastic until the month of July.”

By “drastic,” he means “nice.”

Harry Woolford, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said that over the next few days, the low-pressure trough over the Great Basin will start to break up and move east.

“That means the onshore flow of marine air will decrease a little bit,” he said. “But it will basically remain in force, with nothing--like an offshore Santa Ana wind--to scour it out.”

He said we’ll continue to have morning low clouds and fog throughout the holiday weekend, but skies should clear a little more--and a little earlier--in the afternoons.

The high temperatures will rise a few degrees--to about 73 Downtown, compared to a top reading of 69 Thursday. But the lows will drop a little too, to about 55, compared to 56 on Thursday. If the forecast holds true, today’s average temperature will be 64, compared to 62.5 on Thursday--an improvement of only 1.5 degrees.

“Until a major new weather system moves in--and there’s nothing like that on the horizon--it’ll stay pretty much the same,” Woolford said. “That’s pretty typical for this time of year.”