I’m almost scared to write about the weather. No one wants me to rub in the weather change moving brought. We left Connecticut at the start of a brutal summer. There have been more tornadoes and thunderstorms in Southern New England than I remember from summer’s past. It is sweaty as a Turkish prison!
The map at the top of this entry (courtesy: http://weather.unisys.com/) shows current dew point temperatures. Dew point is an absolute measure of atmospheric moisture and a better indicator of humidity’s effect than relative humidity itself!
That’s it in a nutshell. All the sweaty stuff is east of the Rockies. That’s not unusual. It’s that the way every summer.
It all has to do with water temperature and the influence of the ocean. The water off the East Coast is warmer than water off the West Coast. Oceanic circulation brings here brings cool water down from Alaska. The Gulf Stream does the opposite in the east.
Even mid-summer, beach water here never warms. Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top, but only toes in the water!
In Connecticut a sea breeze brings humid air. In California it does not.
The dew point here is 59° with a breeze off the Ocean. It’s off Long Island Sound on the Connecticut shoreline today, but the dew point at New Haven is 74°.
Dew points in the 70°s are stressful enough to be dangerous.
Officially SoCal has a Mediterranean climate, just like Italy and the beaches of Southern Europe. It’s very nice.
We made a good weather trade.