Many, if not most, people in the coastal areas from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles counties experienced “sundowner” winds last night, and the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management has issued another advisory regarding sundowner winds for the area this afternoon and evening. According to David Gomberg, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Oxnard office, the northerly winds were funneling through canyon areas, causing “down slope warming” along the coast and creating “brief critical fire conditions” (source).
In Santa Barbara, the temperature reached 84 degrees at 9 p.m. Wednesday night. Geography Professor Leila Carvalho pointed out that if you were wondering about the warm temperatures and gusty winds Wednesday evening, “we are experiencing a new sundowner event. For those not so familiar with the term, sundowners are a local name for the downslope (offshore) northerly winds. The warming results from the adiabatic compression of the air (at a rate of 9.8C/km) as the winds flow downslope of the Santa Ynez mountains.”
Dr. Carvalho went on to note that “the Geography Department’s new Ellison Hall weather station measured 81F (~27C) Wednesday evening (November 13) around 22:00 and relative humidity of about 20%. Goleta airport measured a similar temperature. Just for comparison, the temperature was around 70F between 2-3 pm in the afternoon of November 13. Some stations have measured wind gusts of almost 50mi/h in Montecito, but the maximum gusts at the Ellison Hall station were around 20mi/h. This demonstrates the remarkable local differences in meteorological conditions driven by orography” (source: email from Dr. Carvalho, 11/13/13).
As for our new weather station, Leila explains: “Thanks to UCSB instructional grants, the invaluable help of Derek Manov (currently retired), Michael Colee and Eddie Franco (both Earth Research Institute IT support staff), and contributions from professors Tommy Dickey, Dar Roberts, Joe McFadden, and Charles Jones, we have now a new weather station operating on the roof of Ellison Hall. The station is now connected to Weather Underground, but in the future we should have a more sophisticated way to download data and transfer it to GauchoSpace for teaching purposes.”
“We also have another station that will eventually be installed on the roof of the Marine Science building to contrast local changes in temperature, winds, etc. The idea of these stations is to improve labs and classes that use environmental data. Since these data will be public, we hope that they can be useful for multiple purposes. We also expect (and wish) to maintain the stations for many years to come. A link to the station data (Weather Underground) can be found at http://clivac.geog.ucsb.edu/local-weather/” (source: email from Dr. Carvalho, 11/5/13).
