Perfect weather in LA is a lie

Everyone who says Los Angeles weather is perfect is wrong.

Yes, Randy Newman, who once sang of L.A.: “The sun is shining all the time, just like another perfect day,” we are talking to you.

And Anchorman, The Simpsons and L.A. Story, who all got laughs out of meteorologists who can phone it in because nothing changes, you’re mistaken too.

Los Angeles weather is actually rather imperfect. Just ask Craig Herrera, a meteorologist at Fox Weather, who spent two years working in the City of Angels.

“I still get that today, ‘That must’ve been a cake job for you,’” he said. “Actually it wasn’t! I dare you go there and try to forecast in those micro-climates because it’s pretty unique. You can get every form of weather, all within one day.”

Along with its six micro-climates, L.A. also has multiple unique characteristics that lead to extreme weather.

One of those is hydroclimate whiplash, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist for the California Institute for Water Resources.

“Really wet and really dry periods are an intrinsic part of living in Southern California,” he said. “When it rains in pours, but the reverse is also true. And that really tells us why we’re seeing worse droughts and more severe wildfires.”

Todd Hall knows as much about Los Angeles’ sever weather as anyone.

The warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service has himself issued most of the severe weather warnings over the past 20 years.

On average, he issues 150 marine warnings for boaters, 10 to 20 severe storm warmings, as well as the occasional tornado warning.

“We actually live in a very tornado prone area, most people don’t know that,” Hall said. “The Los Angeles basin actually has a higher tornado density than what we see in Tornado Alley.”

The reason L.A.’s tornados are smaller is because of something called the marine layer, which is created from cold waters coming from the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s very much an ingredient of Southern California weather,” Hall said. “I should say it’s not the low clouds that we see. That’s a misnomer.”

The marine lawyer is also the prime source of a certain signature couple of months in and near the beach towns.

“People are familiar with May Gray and June Gloom, sometimes that can extend well into August,” Hall sad.

As part of his research as an economist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Tom Corringham studies L.A.’s atmospheric rivers.

“It’s a long plume of water vapor that come from Hawaii,” he explained. “That moist air rises over the mountains and just dumps water.”

The National Weather Service passed along a 200-page document tracking significant weather in Southern California dating all the way back to flooding in Los Angeles in 1770.

The NWS also pointed to multiple recent weather events, including the Downtown Los Angeles Tornado in 1983, the blizzard of 2023 and the wind and fire storms of 2025.

So if not L.A., does anyone have perfect weather?

“On average it’s pretty nice in L.A.,” Swain admitted.

“You don’t have to think about the weather that much. Rain is relatively infrequent, it’s often sunny and usually not extremely hot and for a lot of people, that’s paradise on Earth. What that misses is a propensity for very extreme weather on occasion.” 

In fact, one way to compare city-by-city is counting days of severe weather. San Diego actually ranks the lowest, followed by San Jose, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas and Honolulu … with Los Angeles at sixth.

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