Southern California braces for another September heat wave
The temperatures were high at 5 a.m. Tuesday and a big one was on tap Tuesday: a high of 108 in Montebello.
“It’s a bit scary for us,” says Montebello Mayor John Viera. “This is a forecast that we don’t typically get this late, especially down here.”
The forecast called for a high of 108, but according to Viera, that’s not the way it is looking.
“We’ve got a high of 108 in the high for today,” says Viera. “We just got a high of 109 degrees a few days ago in mid-September, so the temperatures have been high for the past couple of days, but we had a low of 100 on Monday morning.”
In other words, Monday’s low temperature was the latest warm day that Montebello had seen this August.
“Right now, we are at 100 for Monday,” says Viera.
But this is not a normal August heat wave, says Viera, who added that there are some factors that make it more normal. “The temperatures seem to have been high for the past couple of days, and the only thing really different about this month is the humidity.”
“It’s a very good combination of conditions,” says Viera. “We get a great combination of dry and warm for part of the day, and then it doesn’t rain as much as we normally do, or we would get a drought that would bring the grass down and make it a dry year. But that doesn’t happen this year, so we have a good combination of dry and warm and humid. Then of course, the last two weeks, we get hot and dry, so that makes it not a typical month. All of the conditions we normally would get for a hot and dry month.”
And this heat wave is not a new phenomenon, says Viera.
“I can’t remember any heat wave that’s lasted this long and lasted until the end of August, but we have had temperatures up to 112 in August, and the last