Forecast Clouded

Wednesday’s unusual bout of clouds and rain could be just the beginning of a bad beach season--a prospect that worries merchants and sun-lovers and has meteorologists offering dueling theories.

Bill Patzert, a satellite oceanographer at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says the dark skies will be with us for weeks to come. “It’ll be a foggy and smoggy bummer summer,” he said.

But other meteorologists said the current spurt of overcast skies is just part of Southern California’s seasonal “June gloom.”

“You really can’t say if this is one pattern or another,” said Guy Pearson, forecast meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., a private weather service that provides forecasts for The Times. The company’s forecast for the next three months calls for average cloud conditions, though they agree that temperatures will be below normal.

“June gloom” is a temporary condition that occurs at the beginning of each summer when air over the Pacific, cooled by still-chilly ocean waters, collides with warm air over land. This creates clouds that trap smog but burn off in the afternoon.

Patzert, however, maintains that a lingering La Nina condition, a periodic climate change that cools the eastern and central Pacific, has left the ocean far cooler than usual this year--a condition likely to persist for much of the summer. This means cloudy skies will last longer as well, he says.

The low-pressure system that moved in early Wednesday, bringing rain that broke records set in 1948 at the Los Angeles Civic Center and Riverside, could either be interpreted as part of the long-term climactic shift or the just an overnight system, meteorologists said. In Los Angeles, 0.58 inches of rain fell, breaking the previous record of 0.13 inches, and in Riverside, 0.47 inches fell, compared with the previous record of 0.26 inches.

On Wednesday, gray skies and swift winds kept all but the determined away from Orange County beaches and beachfront shops.

“The weekends are decent, but the weekdays are kind of dead,” lamented Travis Smernoff, manager of Beachcombers Surf and Skate shop on Main Street in Huntington Beach. “We’ve been talking about wishing business would pick up.”

Business is bad down the street at Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream too.

“There’s definitely been a drop in the number of people coming in,” shift manager Crystal Desmond said. “It pretty much varies on the weather, but I would say the last month it’s dropped maybe a third.”

After battling the breeze for about an hour Wednesday afternoon, Newport Beach resident Mike Anderson, 37, and Ruby Cordrey, 56, of Huntington Beach, opted for a park set back from the water.

“It started getting chilly and the papers were flipping around, making it hard to read,” Cordrey said, dressed in a sweater and khakis, and toting a blanket.

Many visitors to Huntington City Beach were packing up early after giving up on the sun, said Kristyna Blazkova, 24, a parking lot attendant.

“During Memorial Day weekend, I was freezing, even in a jacket and hat, but there were still people, many [of them] tourists, coming in their swimsuits and bikinis,” she said. “I think a lot of the people coming now are just here to socialize and eat, not really to soak in the sun.”

Huntington City Beach had a handful of visitors Wednesday, mainly from out of town.

The Vickers family, visiting from Yuma, Ariz., where the temperatures hover around 110 degrees this time of year, spent only three hours at the beach. Their toddler, Tyler, was bundled up in a blanket the whole time.

“It’s not miserable cold, but it’s been kind of a bummer,” said Diana Vickers, 33.

For some, however, the clouds have a silver lining.

Business at Balboa Beach Club Tanning Salon in Huntington Beach has been “double what we’d expect to see for the Memorial Day season,” salon manager Pam Frazier said. “We’ve been seeing quite a few new faces. You hear a lot of, ‘I was going to go to the beach today, but. . . .’ ”