My sister lived in El Paso (Texas) for a few years, and she told me about the time they had a record snowfall there that briefly made El Paso the snow capital of the United States (IE, having largest cumulative snowfall of the season).
I’ll confess that I didn’t really believe her at the time, but this thread coerced me into looking for proof - and I found some! 22.4 inches on December 13-14, 1987 ( http://rgfn.epcc.edu/users/nwselp/snow.html ). Note that El Paso’s second-deepest snowfall was only 8.8 inches on April 4-5, 1983, so the former was really unusual.
(She told me that El Paso has no snow-removal equipment, and nobody had the vaguest idea what to do about all of the stuff. They ended up shutting down the city until it all melted away. My sister and her husband, who had just moved there from Denver, were highly amused.)
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Although the Japanese Current (Kuru Siwa) is a cold one, coming down from the Gulf of Alaska, it apparently keeps the West Coast warmer than it would be without it, including Seattle. And althought the Gulf Stream is a warm current going up the East Coast, apparently it gets too far from the coast near the northeastern states to keep those states warm. The water off northern California in the summer is only around 54 F, but it’s only a few degrees colder in winter and I believe the water in Puget Sound is not much colder in the winter.
Ray (S. F. waters seem to suit sharks now and then.)
comparing the west coast of the US with, say, France and Britain had me laughing.
The main reason that the West Coast has moderate temps near the coast and moderated weather is that the prevailing winds and the jet stream come from the ocean, bringing all the weather in from over warm (relative to, say, North Dakota) water. On the East Coast, the weather usually comes in from the west, where it has gotten cold as it makes its way over cold land. At times, the moisture ends up coming from the south/southwest, and then all hell breaks loose as it hits colder air pushing down from the mid-continent region (as Raleigh found out).
The Sierra Nevada gets quite a bit of snow, as the moisture in the storms off the Pacific is squeezed out of them as they move over the crest (which runs anywhere from 7,000 to 14,000 feet for most of its distance from Lassen Peak down to Owens Peak. I grew up on the OTHER side of them hills, and wistfully watched numerous times during winter as the mountain peaks turned white, while we endured cold wind and no snow.
It depends on your definition of “Los Angeles”. Within the city limits, it has snowed very rarely, as described above. But the mountains to the east and southeast are a different story. Big Bear, to the southeast, and at an altitude of about 8,000 feet, has a ski resort. This winter, however, has been very dry and there has been almost no snow to speak of. Mt. Wilson, home of the first really big telescopes and most of the local TV stations’ transmitters, should have snow on it now, but doesn’t.
And if it didn’t snow in the Sierras, L.A. would not have nearly enough drinking water.
