Cool Front Keeps Spring Under Wraps

Old Man Winter is keeping spring at bay, L.A. style.

Easter bonnets are out of mothballs and the first pitch has been tossed at Dodger Stadium, but across the region Wednesday, people were zipping up jackets and donning scratchy wool sweaters.

And the unseasonably cool temperatures, shuttled in by an eastward-moving low pressure system, will keep spring from full bloom the rest of the week, meteorologists said. Temperatures will continue to hover in the mid- to upper-60s with the threat of rain and snow in the mountains.

“It’s happened before but it’s a pretty unusual storm system, said John Sherwin, a meteorologist with WeatherData, which provides information to The Times. “There’s a lot of cold air aloft bringing this on.”

Big Bear faced an 80% chance of rain Wednesday and has been hit with lows in the mid-20s.

Sure, the regional weather is a laughable whimper of a storm system compared with the blizzard that brought up to 30 inches of snow to the Northeast.

But the local spring chill was enough to prompt George Fong, 56, a state tax auditor on jury duty at the downtown Criminal Courts Building, to pull on a thick sweater as he ate lunch inside the City Hall East courtyard.

“It’s not like spring. But we need some cool weather once in a while,” said Fong, who has lived in Los Angeles all his life. “Summer will be on us soon enough. Then we’ll be dying for days like this.”

While winds blew from 30 to 35 mph downtown, Glendale and parts of the San Fernando Valley reported gusts up to 50 mph.

“We have no reports of the wind causing any problems so far,” said Michele Byrne, a Glendale Police dispatcher. “Other than a lot of bad hair days.”

Dennis Tussey, a meteorological technician with the National Weather Service, said it will be cool and breezy through the weekend, with some low clouds and fog on the coast Saturday and Sunday.

But the unusual conditions will keep skies clear of smog at least throughout the week, the South Coast Air Quality Management District reported.

“This combination of winds and cooler air is not going to bring a lot of smog,” said Joe Cassmassi, of the AQMD. “But we’ll see a lot of it in May.”