Why don’t Santa Ana winds blow by Santa Anna? – substack.com

The winds are usually named where they blow, but the most dangerous of the famous winds of Santa Ana in Los Angeles does not blow by Santa Ana, which is southeast of Los Angeles. Instead, the most difficult Santa is blowing from the northeast, which is crucial to know when you are wondering if the fire north of the resources that you have to pack and prepare to run for your life.

Santa Ana is the first large (300K) independent municipality southeast of Los Angeles on the i5 Golden State highway. Many people in southern California have the feeling that Santa Anna is southeast of Los Angeles, suggesting that the winds of Santa Anna are the spirit of southeast and thus would be inclined to press fires north, not south. This should give some people south of fires a false sense of security, which can be fatal when Santa Anas from the northeast quickly presses fires south.

It is confusing that the worst winter winds of Santa Anna, such as those who drove the Pacific Palisades and Altada fires earlier this month to the south and west, come from the northeast, towards the Valley of Death and Las Vegas.

The wind of Santa Anna in Los Angeles plays an insignificant role in the literature and lyrics of the songs 20th century. Raymond Chandler, for example, famously wrote in Red wind:

A desert wind was blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa analyzes that descend through the mountains and twist your hair and make your nerves jump and itching your skin. On such nights, each drink ends in battle. Meek the little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study the necks of their spouses. Everything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer in a cocktail parlor.

I have always thought that the hot, dry winds of Los Angeles of Los Angeles were baptized in this way because they blown away from the direction of Santa Anna, which is southeast of Los Angeles (and probably these warm winds come over the Santa Rosa mountains from the low, The hot desert of the Coachela Valley further to the southeast). After all, so -called winds: blows north from The North, not to The North, so the wind Santa Anna, I assumed, the blow to Los Angeles by Santa Anna.

I also assumed that many dry but often cooler winds than northeast, which cause so many fires in southern California during dry winters, such as those on January 7, 2025, are a different set of winds from Santa Anas or subset of Santa Anas. I would call them winds on the death valley for the most dry place in America northeast of Los Angeles. (The Valley of Death is intense hot in the summer, but in winter it is more cool than Palm Springs southeast of Los Angeles.)

But everyone else just uses the winds of Santa Anna for all winds of the desert, northern or southern part, although most of them blow to Santa Anna, not from it.

One theory of the origin of the name is that the city of Santa Anna suffered many wind storms in the late 19th century. Thus, the type of wind was designated as “Santa Ana’s wind” by newspapers outside Santa Anna, much about the disgust of real estate developers Santa Anna, who did not like their city to connect with a destructive wind. Another theory is that Santa Anna’s winds tend to blow in the same direction as the Santa Anna River flows to the southwest to the Pacific:

So Santa Anna is not where Santa Anna’s wind blows from But struck yesS

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My attempt to distinguish between the wind of Santa Anna, which is blowing from southeast to northwest, and the wind of the valley of death, which blows from northeast to southwest, may sound meticulous.

But you just wait until in the brush on one east-west transverse range from east-west of a larger Los Angeles, and suddenly the question whether the wind presses the fire north or south, to you or away from you, becomes full of full of you Interest.

Therefore, it may be worth it to have more precise names for winds driving to help people have a better feeling about whether they should start packing if they need to be evacuated.

Recently, the weather forecasts are quite entrepreneurial, inventing popular neologisms such as the “atmospheric river” and a “bomb cyclone”. So why not start using the sinister sound term “Death Valley Wind” for the type of Santa Ana from the northeast, which contribute to so many fires?