More plant availability and selection.īecause the weather is a bit cooler, the holidays, and for some of us, the urge to cocoon in winter, most of us aren’t spending as much time in our outdoor spaces as we do the rest of the year. Take advantage of this by digging up the spaces you’ll need for your new plants, or at the very least, aerating your soil!ģ. When we have had our typical amount of rain, our soil is much easier to dig, than it is after a hot dry winter, when the lack of water has turned our soil into what feels like concrete. The cloudier, cooler days of winter are ideal for planting because plants have a better chance of survival due to not drying out as quickly.Īs a general rule, our winters in San Diego are much wetter than Spring, Summer, and even into late October. These are usually the least favorable days to plant and increases the chance of transplant shock for plants. In the San Diego area, we have many hot and dry days. Plants have a much better chance of survival. “There’s got to be some plan to mitigate the impact of these humid heat waves.1. “We probably need to rethink our mitigation and intervention strategies,” he said. It requires a new approach to reducing heat risk, he said, perhaps including reducing electricity rates during heat waves to make life-saving cooling more affordable. And the COVID-19 pandemic makes it even harder to handle, since space at cooling centers may be limited by social distancing, and people facing economic hardship may not be able to afford to turn on air conditioning at home. That’s particularly hazardous to older or ill people, he said. With humid air, sweat doesn’t evaporate off, and people can overheat. The normal human response to heat is sweat, which allows evaporative cooling through the skin. It’s not only uncomfortable, but also dangerous, he said. So the background climate warming makes heat waves hotter, and in California more humid, as well.” “In terms of heat waves, it’s like having heat waves on steroids. “The warming associated with climate change is projected to accelerate in the future,” he said. Scientists are measuring those effects already, he said over the last 22 years, San Diego broke heat records 89 times, but surpassed cold records only once. “A lot of the time in these big summer time heat waves, the air is brought in from the south, from that part of the ocean that’s warming a lot,” he said.Ĭlimate change is expected to amplify heat waves in the future, as land and water temperatures increase, he said. The high humidity in the recent weather pattern comes from air flow from a portion of the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California that’s warming faster than global oceans on average, he said. “It starts off warmer the next day, and after one or two or three of these cycles of oppressive heat during the day, and hot, muggy nights, especially people with health vulnerabilities, begin to get sick, and some people die.” “The humid heat is more oppressing during the day, and it doesn’t cool off at night, so you don’t get the respite from the heat at night,” Gershunov said. Nighttime lows, usually in the 60s during the summer in San Diego, didn’t drop much below 70 degrees Fahrenheit over the past week, Connolly said. The wetter air retains heat, so temperatures climb during the day and persist at night, allowing little relief. “We’re seeing temperatures in the 90s, but it feels like 100.” “That’s what we were seeing across most valley areas,” Connolly said. Damp air doesn’t allow much evaporation, so it feels hotter than it is, making it harder for people to cool off. In the summer, it’s usually 20 percent to 30 percent in San Diego, Connolly said. The higher it is, the wetter the atmosphere. Relative humidity represents the ratio of the current humidity to the highest possible amount of water the air can hold. Besides the heat were high relative humidity levels of 70 percent to 80 percent, said Samantha Connolly, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. The recent heat wave sent mercury soaring to triple digit temperatures in dozens of San Diego communities. “Specifically, in California, they’re not only becoming more intense and longer-lasting, but they’re also changing their flavor, becoming more humid.”
“Their activity has been increasing all over the globe. “Heat waves are one of the extreme weather events that are most directly influenced by global warming,” Gershunov said. The heat wave that has smothered San Diego County for nearly two weeks may be waning, but it shows the wave of the future, when hot, muggy weather will be more common, says Alexander Gershunov, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
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