My job is forecasting the weather at KMIR. Our market, Palm Springs, covers a small geographic area. It’s not even a whole county!
People think it’s boring to forecast in the desert. Nah. Sometimes it’s repetitive. I can deal with that. There’s always something interesting going on.
Locales have individual climatic quirks like baseball parks have ground rules. The Coachella Valley, where the vast majority of our viewers live, is a protected valley. We are flanked by mountains. We get “rain shade.” Real term. I didn’t make it up.
The San Bernardino Mountains are north, San Jacinto and Santa Ana Mountains west and the Little San Bernardino Mountains are off to the east. We’re wedged in tight.
A small storm hitting SoCal this weekend will drop nearly all its rain before it gets to Palm Springs! The largest rainfall will be on the eastern slopes of the Santa Ana’s. The east face of the San Jacinto range should drain most of what’s left. The tallest mountaintops will get snow.
The notoriously awful QPF (Quantitative Precipitation Forecast) from the GFS model say .06″ Sunday and another .04″ Monday at Palm Springs Airport (PSP). John Wayne Airport (SNA), west of Palm Springs and on the coastal side of the mountains, is forecast for .33″, over three times as much.
There’s are reasons Palm Springs gets less than six inches of rain in an average year. Rain shade is major.