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56. Nothing but blue skies do I see

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gloom

Is this the "Land of Sunshine?" You don't need a weatherman to tell you it isn't so.A veteran Angeleño (that is, anyone here at least a year) knows the disappointment of waking to skies as transparent as freshly poured concrete, of noons that appear filtered through a dome of dirty glass, and of afternoons that play out in miserable dullness until, like a cruel gift, sunset roars through a slit on the western horizon in colors of magenta and gold.

The climate people say we have only two seasons in Los Angeles: wet and dry. But we know, depending on where we live, many more seasons of light.

Right now, it's the season of gray light, the season of a newcomer's first regret.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June delivers an average of just 14 clear days. The definitions of clear and cloudy are subjective, but on even the partly cloudy days, the daylight hours are at least half obscured.

In coastal cities from Malibu to Seal Beach, the gloom can linger all day, putting off the start of summer until after the 4th of July.

The gray season is made in the Pacific Ocean. Cold currents rise close to shore; a persistent high-pressure zone further out channels warmer air eastward; and the springtime vortex of the Catalina Eddy fabricates fog from the interaction of the cool water and the warm air and pushes it on shore when the air of inland valleys rises in the heat of midday.

Television weathercasters call the visible result "the marine layer" although what they're really talking about is fog.

It ambles over the beaches, flows in wide streams up the former bed of the Los Angeles River through the western half of the city, and takes general possession of the basin under the same inversion layer that brews smog. On good days, the sun burns down through half a mile of gray clouds and illuminates, at last, a city that seems to have been forgotten by color.

It could be worse. Tourists before the mid-20th century complained that months of dull haze shrouded the charms of what had been advertised as a sunlit, Mediterranean city.

And our season of gloom won't get any shorter, at least not until the cycles of El Niños and La Niñas return to the pattern they had before 1998. According to Cal Tech oceanographer William Patzert and colleagues Steve LaDochy and Jeff Brown of Cal State LA, the 1980s and 1990s were years of truly "endless summer" in Los Angeles marked by a succession of bright days and clear nights.

That charmed pattern is broken. The oscillation to warmer, wetter, less foggy winters and springs from seasons that are cooler, dryer, and more likely to spawn gray days takes about 25 years. We have a long time to wait for more light in June.

The gray skies, in their ever-returning cycle, have been faithful in their own baleful way. You could look on the bright side: the grey skies of spring are part of the natural air conditioning that keeps much of the basin cooler in summer.

Actually, it would be better if we dropped that pretense. L.A. the place we've come to, and it's as much mediocre gray as superlative brilliance.

The image on this page was taken by Flickr user posixeleni. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

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