Monsoon and Low-Lying Clouds

What are "May Gray" and "June Gloom"? How does the southwestern U.S. monsoon season impact low-level clouds on the California coastline? In this episode, we talked with Dr. Rachel Clemesha, a Project Scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California - San Diego, to help answer those questions. Dr. Clemesha's research focuses on the climate of coastal California and western North America. She examines climate extremes, marine layer clouds and fog, relationships between regional weather phenomena and large-scale climate variability, and explores the consequent impacts on public and ecosystem health.

Dr. Clemesha spoke with us about atmospheric rivers and how they influence wildfire risk, climate modeling for the North American monsoon, and her collaborative projects with a range of land managers and partners.

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, or Southwest CASC -

Emile: supported by New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. We are your co-hosts, Emile Elias and Sarah Leroy. Here we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in science, weather and climate adaptation, and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Sarah: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative, forward thinking and creative scientific research and adaptation solutions will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world.

For this episode, we're talking with Rachel Clemesha, a project scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, and a consortium P.I. for the Southwest CASC. Rachel's research is generally focused on marine layer clouds, fog, and the climate of western North America. Today, we're going to discuss these research topics as well as Rachel's research funded by the southwest CASC, which is focused on the seasonality of precipitation across the southwest and projected changes.

Welcome, Rachel. Thank you so much for talking with us today. So, I just wanted to start by asking how you got into this field. Most people that we've talked to have an interesting story about their journey that led to their research specialization. And so, I'm wondering what your story is. 

Rachel: Thanks for having me, Sarah and Emile.

Yes. Since I was a little kid, I, well, I was shocked at the fact that there are endangered species. That species could go extinct, especially due to human interaction with the environment and with them. So, from a very young age, I wanted to do something that would help endangered species, you know, make sure nothing went extinct.

And I was very science focused, though, so I did my undergrad in chemistry. So, I always knew that I wanted to go environmental in the long run, but I started with some just basic physical sciences. So I started my undergrad in chemistry, and then I started grad school doing atmospheric chemistry. And then just, you know, how things change, I ended up moving away from the chemistry part and just staying in the atmospheric science and dynamics aspect. But I'll just add that one of the exciting things about the southwest CASC is even though I do climate work and atmospheric science, I never had done anything directly related to endangered species until a connection that was made with my former advisor met someone at a southwest CASC meeting who was an ecologist and land manager for the Department of Defense.

So, then I got to collaborate and take some of my climate work and make it relevant for some of the questions they had about endangered species management. So that was really cool, kind of coming full circle. 

Sarah: Excellent. Thanks. Yeah, that's an interesting story; starting out with the interest in endangered species, but now studying more atmospheric processes and things.

And so, speaking of atmospheric processes, one of your main areas of research, as I mentioned, is marine layer clouds. So, before we get into that, could you just describe what they are and how they impact southern California? And then obviously what you're studying too. 

Rachel: Yeah. So, just to start with describing these clouds, marine layer clouds are low uniform clouds that form over the ocean or coastal air masses in the lowest part of the atmosphere. So usually less than a kilometer high, but they can reach all the way to the ground and be what we call fog. They form up as a blanket. So the cloud type is stratus or stratocumulus. And they cover the sky, so they're not like isolated puffs - you can imagine a different cloud type. This is more uniform.

And when they reach the surface, that's what we call fog. It's essentially stratus on the ground. And these are important because they modulate a lot of the surface processes and they're kind of a vector that brings in some of the marine influence over the coastal land terrain. So they of course block out the sun. So it's kind of like, say, like a beach umbrella.

Sometimes you still, you still need your sunscreen because diffuse light will come through them. But it's not going to be, you know, a bright, hot, sunny day. And they also - so that reduces the temperature. And also it's of interest for people that are interested in solar forecasting and solar power, for instance, these clouds are going to make a big difference.

And it's really amazing how clockwork it can be. It's May and yeah, these clouds have just rolled in and we usually get them this time of year. And it's, they're on point this year as well. 

Emile: So I understand that you first started researching marine layer clouds as part of an internship with your local utility, the San Diego Gas and Electric. So can you tell us a little bit more about that research and what it was like working with a utility company? 

Rachel: Yes. So, it was a while ago now, but when I was a grad student, I did two summer internships with San Diego Gas and Electric, SDG and E, and they're interested in these low level clouds for a couple of reasons.

One is intra-day forecasting. So as more people put solar panels on their homes and if the cloud - it has a diurnal cycle, so it tends to be cloudier in the morning and then kind of recedes and can be sunny in the afternoon. And so the timing of when that is going to happen is going to change how they deal with the grid, because all of a sudden you can have homes that were pulling from their (SDG&E) sources now getting a sunny afternoon and not pulling from their sources anymore or the opposite. 

So it's dealing with the load and also day-ahead, they want to know, they want to forecast demand. So if it's going to be a sunny day versus a cloudy day. So those are the time scales that they're interested in for those initial internships I did. So more the weather time scales, but it's a good relationship and you know, we go on and off talking with each other. 

They have a meteorology team. And I've seen the team grow, mostly via their interest in fire weather. So when I first did that internship, there was one meteorologist. Now there's a whole practical department of meteorology there, and we still are collaborating right now, actually, on extreme heat and heat waves. So, it's a pretty fun local partner, you know, a stakeholder of a different type. 

Emile: Excellent. And I'm curious about how you study marine layer clouds. Like what methodologies do you use and what instrumentation do you use to study this phenomenon? 

Rachel: Yeah, I study in certain ways, and I'll tell you how other people that I collaborate also study it.

So I do a lot of remote sensing work. So I use satellites. So GOES West is a geostationary satellite. So what that means is it rotates with the Earth so we can see, you know, the same location, the West Coast, for example, every 15 minutes or so. We get a shot of what the land surface, atmosphere looks like.

So as part of my PhD, collaborating with other people at Scripps, we made a record of low level clouds from the satellite data. And I'm proud to say that as of this year, now, it's a 30 year long record. So that makes it official climatology, so to speak. So we have 30 years worth of satellite derived observations of low clouds.

So we can - and that's usually at four kilometer resolution times depending on what time of day you want to look at can be one kilometer resolution. So I do a lot of data analysis on that satellite record, tying it in with other meteorological and climate variables and seeing how things co-vary or not. I also, myself, I've done validation exercises with people to use weather or climate models to try to simulate these clouds, which is a very difficult problem.

And often I'm in there doing the validation, saying taking our observations either from the satellite data or also we have -  airports have really good long term records. So if we're interested more in long term changes, then I go to the airports and airfields because they have good observations of cloud cover and cloud based height often that goes back to 1950.

So the data set I use, you know, depends on if the questions are interested in inter-decadal and trends versus if you want more spatial detail, of course, because the airports are point locations. But yeah, so then I use those observational data sets and try to understand which model configurations do the best at trying to, in the model, create these low level clouds.

And I also collaborate with people where I give remote sensing data and they're doing field work. Actually you know, for instance in agricultural fields, looking at how water use change could be managed differently on foggy days versus not. And so I kind of do some of the climate support for some of these field projects that are on the ground.

Emile: So you might have already started to talk about this a little bit, but I know you're currently the lead on a project that's focused on marine fog. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that specific research. 

Rachel: Yeah, that ties in nicely to your previous question about how do we, you know, what are the methods. Because this is a really exciting project. It's a five year project. We're still in year one and it's funded by the Heising-Simmons Foundation. So this is a private foundation. And, there's five campuses involved. And I'm the principal investigator at Scripps, but I'm collaborating with other experts in the field that bring those different methodological skills. So it's really exciting because we - this is a chance to collaborate and really bring things forward.

And so, Indiana University, our partner there, who used to be located in California, which makes sense because, yeah, you're partly motivated by, you know, the phenomenon you see locally. He's doing a lot of really cutting edge modeling work that we're taking global climate models but then having this much finer grid just over kind of the west coast of North America, we're seeing some really good results with capturing patterns that I haven't seen in other modeling exercises we've done.

So that's really exciting. And then there's three other universities, Cal State Monterey, San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz, and they're kind of the field team. So we're going to be setting up measurements at different locations where we collect fog water. And some of the questions have to do with chemistry, what is in the fog water, chemically speaking.

And then other questions have to do with variability tied to meteorology. And it's the first time that we'll have this network spread from San Diego to Northern California and hopefully be able to compare the, you know, the years that we have this project going over and maybe find support to keep some of these field sites up. So, yeah, just on last Friday, we set up a fog collector near Scripps Institution of Oceanography at a little bit higher elevation.

So we hope to have some results coming in soon. 

Emile: Excellent. Can you describe for us what a fog collector looks like? 

Rachel: Yeah. The one that we're using is called a standard fog collector. And Dan Fernandez at Cal State Monterey has made these. And also it's great because if different people use this, you know - we call it the standard fog collector -we can compare. And it's basically a mesh net that's, you know, taut and I forget the exact, how big it is, but it's oriented into the prevailing winds. And then there's the fog kind of moves through this mesh and then collects water. And that water then is piped into something like what you use for rain to measure how much rain you have.

And you also need to have a rain gauge separate from that, nearby as well, so that you can differentiate when you're getting water from the fog versus water that's just coming from precipitation. It's kind of a two part process. 

Emile: Excellent. Thanks. I just needed to have a picture in my mind of a fog collector. 

Rachel: Yeah. Think of a mesh thing that’s kind of strapped up into the wind.

Emile: Great. So in the past, you were featured on the Scripps Instagram account, and there you explained May Gray and June Gloom. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about those terms and what they tell us and why they matter. 

Rachel: Yeah. So that's our marine layer cloud season in southern California.

And like I said, because these are horizontal uniform clouds, it's, you know, you're going to look up and it's going to be all gray or depending on your mindset, all gloomy. So that has to do with the seasonality of the marine layer clouds in southern California. A couple interesting points on that is that in previous work, we showed that May Gray and June Gloom are, you know, they're common terms used, but they're very appropriate for Southern California.

But they're not as you go farther up the coast. So this is not just a Southern California phenomenon. It's also central California, San Francisco, Northern California that you also have low level clouds. They tend to be lower there, so they tend to be more fog than Stratus. That's that project, you know, we're looking through California and people often use the word coastal fog.

So they tend to be higher in height even though they're still low clouds in Southern California. And they happen more in May and June, whereas there's this northward March, so to speak, of this cloudiest, overcast most time of year where, in central and northern California it tends to be later, like July and August that tend to be, have more coastal fog.

So they have their own terms. Fogust is a popular one. And that's the one I remember for now. I've heard July no Sky and, but also there’s some current work I'm doing right now that ties May Gray and June Gloom, which I think of as usually used to describe the sky conditions and the overcast, you know, feeling.

But also it's super interesting in Southern California, it's more if you look at the extreme heat days. So the hottest days and you kind of say, okay, the hottest days, I'm going to say the 5% hottest days in the historical record. We're going to call those, you know, extreme heat days. But if you look and you vary that threshold seasonally, it's actually more likely that you're going to have a hotter, extreme day in the winter than you are going to in May or June in Southern California.

So the distribution of daily maximum temperature in Southern California is pretty fascinating because during this May Gray, June gloom time period,  the shape is kind of blunted. You don't get hot days. Okay. Maybe you can get some warm days, but you don't get hot days, versus in winter in Southern California, we have another local phenomenon called Santa Ana winds.

And during Santa Ana winds, you can actually get hot days. So it's kind of shocking. The May Gray, June Gloom. It really runs deep. Both in cloud cover and also temperature extremes as well. 

Emile: Yeah. So you already mentioned working with the Department of Defense and working with the utility early in your career. And I'm curious about what other managers you typically work with.

Rachel: Yes, I work with other land managers, for instance, from the National Park Service at Point Reyes, for example, and also, water managers as well. So there's the Colorado River Climate and Hydrology work group that I interact with and I get a lot of feedback from them trying to make my work useful to them. 

Emile: Excellent. Thanks. And I have a feeling that that relates to this next project, which is funded by the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, and it aims to analyze future projections of precipitation in the Colorado River basin and the broader southwest. So can you tell us a little bit about that project and what you found? 

Rachel: Yes. So in that project we, you know, our aim was on the future but often on your way there you find what models are good and not good at, in the current time period.

So I think something that is maybe underappreciated that I hope to highlight in this work is how diverse the seasonality of precipitation is in the southwest. So if you imagine southern California or California, we're really a winter dominated precipitation regime. We're a mediterranean climate, so we get most all of our precipitation in the cool season. And then we have typically dry and warm summers.

But as you go into the interior southwest, you move into the region that is impacted by the North American monsoon. So now you're going to get summer precipitation. And the farther you go east into the southwest, there's an area that's kind of bimodal. It gets a little bit of the winter precipitation and a little bit of the monsoon.

And then as you go farther into New Mexico you're just getting majority from the monsoon. So there's these different seasonalities that are a part of our climate. And I was interested in how those, the seasonal timing of precipitation, was going to change in the future. But first, when we were going to use these global climate models that are downscaled to spatial resolutions that are useful for decision making. We had to examine, well which ones are even getting that seasonality correct?

Who is getting the monsoon precipitation when you should, which models are getting that bimodal distribution, which is hard, right. A little bit of both of those systems. So a lot of that work focused on, kind of ranking the skill of what climate models we could have more potential confidence in. Are they getting the right signal for the right reason?

I don't know, but at least they're trying to get the right signal. And I think it highlights how difficult climate models can struggle with getting the North American monsoon. It's pretty, the Mediterranean climate, there's a lot more success in getting those patterns, you know, as expected. So I think part of that work was to allow users to see which models are getting this seasonality realistic and which are not.

So you could, you know, focus on skillful models and remove deficient models in some cases. And also just highlight that a lot of times, it's very practical to work with downscaled data. That's that higher resolution data. But in that process we also do something called bias correction, which is very useful and needed, but just, that bias correction can mask some of the things like seasonality, because the bias correction preserves historical seasonality from the training data set, the observations.

And so sometimes you have to just remember, if you're working with downscaled data and you think you're validating how well it's doing in the historical periods, and then you have to go one step back even further to the models before they're bias corrected, do your validation exercises then, there, and then you can go forward in the process of looking at projections.

So I think there's a lot of methodological kind of highlights that came out of that work. 

Emile: Excellent. And I can imagine that it's really relevant and important for managers on the Colorado River. And so wondering if and how you shared the information with them and how they may be thinking about incorporating it into their work. 

Rachel: Yeah. So, Seth Shanahan is part of that working group I mentioned. And we got connected through another project where we're looking at the predictability of precipitation in the springtime. And, you know, I learned a lot from him. And so we stayed, you know, interacting. And so he's a coauthor on this paper that we just have submitted recently about that work I was just mentioning to you.

And so they're also interested in long term changes in seasonality because there is, you know, needing to know there's been some work that shows, you know, springtime drying, how that impacts the water resources. Like what time of year there's going to be changes in your precipitation. If there is going to be or there are going to be changes, impacts the full picture of water management.

It's not just is there gonna be more or less, but when is there going to be more or less or is it going to be more frequent, but less intense, things like that. So, we've stayed in touch and hopefully that information will get to the relevant parties through that collaboration. 

Sarah: Great. Thanks, Rachel. So I wanted to, you just talked about one of your Southwest CASC funded projects, but you're also a part of a team on another Southwest CASC project.

That one is more focused on atmospheric rivers and how they might affect wildfire risk and water resources in the southwest region. So I guess first, could you just define atmospheric rivers for our listeners who might be unfamiliar? And I'll just take a quick moment to remind folks that our very first Come Rain or Shine podcast episode talked about atmospheric rivers.

So check that out if you want to hear more about them. But yeah. Could you tell us what atmospheric rivers are? 

Rachel: Yeah. Well, can I ask you, Sarah? Quickly. How long ago was that you had that first podcast? How long has the show been running for?

Sarah: Six years now. So that was in 2020. 

Rachel: Wow. 

Sarah: When we first started this.

Rachel: Okay. That's awesome. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Rachel: So an atmospheric river, think of as a long narrow kind of conveyor belt of moisture in the sky. So river in the sky because it's long and narrow and it's moisture but it's water vapor usually until we get to a certain point in the process. So when conditions align that there's a storm, usually an extra tropical cyclone but not necessarily, but you have this circulation pattern that taps into moisture that is from the lower latitudes from the tropics. And then it channels it towards land.

It channels it out of the tropics into the mid-latitudes. And so when you have this river in the sky of moisture and it hits the mountains, it hits the coastal ranges, it gets pushed upward and then the water vapor goes from, you know, gas phase to liquid or depending on temperature to snow, and it condenses and falls.

And then you have you, can have heavy rain or snow. Depending on the strength of the atmospheric river, and there's a scale that's been defined for them that goes from 1 to 5, they can be very helpful, you know, to bring us needed water or they could cause flooding, depending. So there's a range of beneficial to at times harmful atmospheric rivers.

But they're a part of our climate here along the west coast of the US. They can penetrate inland in different corridors, make it into the southwest more and, you know, they happen around the globe. 

Sarah: Yeah. Thanks, I know we get impacted by ARs here in Tucson regularly also. And I'll just add that that first episode on Atmospheric rivers was with a few people, but one of them was Sasha Gershunov, who is the PI on this project that we're going to talk about in just a second, and your colleague obviously at Scripps. Okay. But so now we understand atmospheric rivers, how they work. I actually did not know there's a scale of intensity. It sounds kind of like the Fujita scale with tornadoes, right? 1 to 5. That's interesting to know they've added that. 

Anyways, so could you talk about this project, the specific one I mentioned with the southwest CASC? And then I know it's still in progress, but if you're able to share anything so far that you guys have found, that might be interesting. Yeah. Please. Thanks. 

Rachel: Yeah. So the project takes these different, it's really, like, a whole year approach.

So as we were talking about earlier, you know, the atmospheric rivers, you know, bring us our rain in the West and our Mediterranean climate. We get rain from other sources also, but the atmospheric rivers are a large proportion of the precipitation we get, usually in the cool season. And then we're also looking at Santa Ana winds. So the interaction between these different phenomena.

So Santa Ana winds are strong downslope offshore winds driven by cool air settling in the Great Basin and then flowing down the mountain ranges into the coast. There's also Diablo winds, similar kind of offshore wind event that happens in Northern California. So part of this project, what we're doing is expanding some of the records that we have of these downslope winds.

So we have records that we're improving of Santa Ana winds and then we'll also be looking at the Diablo winds. So basically another wind regime with a larger footprint. And in this project we're thinking about, you know, the interactions that occur. The Santa Ana winds many of us might be familiar with because they're so highly associated with fire weather.

These are dry, hot winds and they can get very gusty and so it makes it very hard to fight a fire under Santa Ana wind conditions and spread can really occur quickly. So, you know, there's tie ins with fuel when you have heavy precipitation or when you have that heavy precipitation, how that modifies the growth of grasses and the landscape that then potentially not necessarily it depends on what ecosystem you're in.

And if the fires are dominated by wind driven or if that's not always the case, but we're looking at how these things interact with each other and how again, I'm interested in seasonality, how seasonality might change. Because if you have a more narrow Santa Ana wind season, what that means. And so this interaction between our precipitation, which is really kind of the cool, moist, rainy part, and then the hot air, the hot breath of the Santa Ana winds and how they kind of compete with each other and can make or break lots of things including fire, weather and precipitation.

Sarah: Okay. So before we kind of wrap up, I just wanted to ask if there's anything that we didn't ask you that you would like to share with our listeners. 

Rachel: Yeah, there's just, there's one other project that was I had funded previously from the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center that I wanted to mention, because it's part of my research evolution, I would say.

 I was first as a grad student, you know, really focused on the coast and focused on the marine layer clouds and their variability over different time scales. And during my PhD project I found an interesting connection, but I wasn't able to finish at the time. And then I got a small Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center grant so I could dig into that more.

And that had to do with how the North American monsoon and moisture influxes from the North American Monsoon into coastal Southern California were impacting low level clouds. And it's not that we're necessarily getting that much precipitation at all from the North American monsoon because Southern California, coastal Southern California is really at the northwest edge of the monsoon footprint.

But even without getting precipitation, we get an influx of moisture into the atmosphere at a higher level than these marine layer clouds form and persist. And it might sound a little counterintuitive, but because of how the radiative properties of the low clouds work out when you have moisture above the cloud layer, it actually diminishes your low clouds because to maintain themselves the low clouds if there's dry air above them, then it can maintain this temperature inversion basically the top of the cloud layer.

So that was really an interesting result and I have to give credit to my collaborations with meteorologists at the National Weather Service at San Diego office, because these operational meteorologists have so much wealth of information. And I first learned about how this could potentially be something that's going on through talking and reading the work of operational meteorologists nd so he was a coauthor on this work and it was the first time, you know, we've got it into the scientific literature.

And it also allowed me to start thinking about the North American monsoon and then thinking more about precipitation and all that. So I think it was a stepping stone to the east, basically, to get me farther away from the coast and into thinking of other southwest phenomenon. So I just wanted to mention that. 

Sarah: That's great. Yeah. And I like how it kind of, we can see the evolution of your research.

I'm just curious about the timing. So, you know, the monsoon timing is different for different areas. Right. So in Tucson we're kind of June through September. And I know that's different as you go east into New Mexico. So from what you were seeing with this, the monsoon interacting with those low marine layer clouds, what timing, I guess, of the year?

Was it June, July time or different? 

Rachel: Yeah. Like more July, August, September. 

Sarah: Okay. 

Rachel: So and I think it's part of the reason why we were talking about earlier the different seasonality of low cloud cover in Southern California versus Northern California. In Southern California, if we're looking at precipitable water, for example, that's like if you took the water in a column of air and condensed it and said, how much is there?

 But it's spread through the column of air. And we looked above the marine boundary layer where we, the low clouds are, because remember I was saying in this case it's the higher, the free troposphere that matters. In San Diego, you can see this huge jump from June to July where we're starting to get okay it's getting the free troposphere is getting quite you know, there's a big change we see, but they don't see that in Oakland, for example, where we also have long term measurements.

So they're not getting, they're too far north. They're not getting that monsoon signal like we are in Southern California. And yeah it's partly impacting I believe, you know, the July August cloud cover. We still have our May Gray and June Gloom are still going strong because we don't have that North American monsoon influence yet. And there's and so I don't want to overplay the influence of the North American monsoon in the moisture.

It's one of very many ingredients that go into knowing if it's what the cloud cover is going to be like and the footprint of that cloud cover. 

Sarah: Great. Very interesting. So switching gears over to our hope question. So we like to ask everybody that we talk to you about where they find hope for the future. And so you know, what gives you hope?

Rachel: Well, I think just to all the podcast listeners, you give me hope. Because if you're listening to this it means that you're interested and you want to learn more. And so just the fact that there are people like that, that gives me hope. And, you know, sometimes I get invited to different events to talk with the community, like, you know, Earth Day talks or they're I gave a talk on Earth Day to a local community group in Del Mar. But they do it, you know, a couple times a year.

They don't just, it's not just an Earth Day thing. It's, you know, a seminar series that the community puts on. So I think that gives me hope. Just, you know, that people want to learn more and educate themselves.

Sarah: That's a great answer, and I'm not sure we've gotten that one before.

So I was like, getting new, new answers is why we keep asking it. Everybody has something different that they're hopeful for. 

Rachel: What do you what do you usually get? Now I'm curious. 

Sarah: I don't know about usual. Everybody does have different answers but sometimes we get a lot of future generation, you know, which I mean, makes sense, right?

Future generation gives me hope. My daughter gives me hope. And so I think that that makes sense. Emile, I don't. What else can you think of? Any other common answers? 

Emile: Yeah, it's I think the most common answer is what you said. The future, children, people being curious that that's probably the most common answer. Sometimes it's people learning something new about their research.

And I think that like, the linking the research to solutions, sometimes people have those answers as well. 

Sarah: Yeah. And now that we're talking too I think another common one is like collaborations. So the people that they work with in the management partners that they work with also give them a lot of hope because they're, you know, they're the people on the ground doing the work. Very hard work for climate adaptation and so I think that's another answer we get. 

 Okay, last question. One thing that you'd like listeners to remember from our conversation today. 

Rachel: Okay, one thing is hard. Can I give, can I give two things? 

Sarah: Yes. I think our last participant had three. But yes. 

Rachel: Okay. Yeah. One takeaway I think that a lot of my, you know, research has made me realize is just the inner connection between different phenomena like the North American monsoon.

You don't really think of that as impacting the coast, but I mean, the marine layer clouds and the relationship they have and, you know, there's all sorts of different instances where things that you maybe originally thought of as being separate as you dig more into, you know, with the Santa Ana winds and the atmospheric rivers. Okay, they're separate processes but they're going to come together to impact what the landscape is going to look like.

And my other takeaway is, if you are planning a vacation to Southern California and you want it to be hot and sunny, I would advise not coming in May or June. You should come later in the summer. The water will also be warmer. 

Sarah: Great advice. Yeah, well, thank you, Rachel very much for joining us today, this great conversation.

Rachel: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Emile: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the USGS Southwest CASC, New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes!

Sarah: A special thanks to our production crew, Reanna Burnett and Lauren White. If you want more information, have any questions for the speakers or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our website.