Weather
September 11, 2017- Around 11 thousand PG&E customers were left without power in the San Francisco Bay Area,CA today after an unusual wind event that happened overnight. Trees fell on power lines and caused power outages.
Meteorologists said they would have issued a warning if they had seen the weather coming. The wind may have been isolated in small pockets enough to go undetected by weather prediction models.
The wind event only lasted two hours and came on very suddenly. Currently, the atmosphere in the Bay Area is very unstable causing scattered thunderstorms.
The National Weather Service of the San Francisco Bay Area/ Monterey, California issued a statement this morning about the unusual wind event.
“Did you feel it? An line of convection generated strong southerly winds on an outflow boundary last night. Peak winds of 54mph were reported at both Pebble Beach and the Spring Valley RAWS. Timing: around 2am at Pebble Beach, 3am near Santa Cruz, 3:30am near San Jose, 4am near Spring Valley, 5am North Bay. The 2nd and 3rd images show the passage of the outflow boundary bringing a wind shift (from N to S, increase in RH, and a drop in temperature). The erratic nature of the convective outflow and our complex terrain meant some areas stayed calm while others nearby felt the full force of the gusts.”
Meterologists are still mystified
“We’re still digging into it,” said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the weather service. “It wasn’t something we were expecting to occur. Nothing in our data suggested there would be significant wind gusts out of this.”
“We’re trying to nail down why it happened.” – San Jose Mercury News Article
