Recent Bay Area winds aren't just strong, they're record-breaking
With so many people asking, we decided to look at the data to determine if May and June were indeed exceptionally windy for the Bay Area.
We analyzed average maximum daily wind gusts at five Bay Area airports: Santa Rosa, SFO, Oakland, San Jose, and Livermore. We chose maximum wind gusts over average wind speed because they better reflect the memorable, extreme weather experiences people tend to notice.
The Bay Area's wind patterns in 2025 have indeed been abnormally strong. So far through June 26th, Oakland is on pace to have its windiest month of June on record, with an average wind gust of 34.23 mph, nearly 4 mph higher than the second place year of 2010 — the city has records going back to 1914. Livermore and Santa Rosa, are currently tracking towards a top three windiest June on record.
May was equally remarkable. Oakland tied its second-highest value ever, while San Jose, Santa Rosa and Livermore all posted their third windiest Mays since records began. In fact, all five monitored stations ranked in their top five all-time for May gust intensity.
The longer-term trend is just as striking. Over the past decade, May and June have grown measurably windier across the Bay Area, particularly in the East Bay. Since 2000, SFO, Oakland, Livermore and San Jose have all logged multiple top five wind gust seasons during that window, with 2025 ranking near the top at each.
But why?
To account for this year's windiness, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain points to an unusually persistent and eastward-shifted North Pacific High this year. 'This is exactly the pattern you'd expect to generate unusually strong northwesterly winds along the coast and in some of the near-coastal inland valleys,' he said. The tighter pressure gradient between that offshore high and the Central Valley thermal low ramps up wind speeds across the region.
Bay Area wind expert and meteorologist Mike Godsey agrees, citing the powerful gusts on June 20 and 21, which were driven by a particularly intense and low-altitude coastal jet fueled by that same setup.
The longer-term trend is harder to pin down, but there are hints. The Fourth California Climate Assessment projects stronger Bay Area winds as rapid inland warming tightens the seasonal pressure gradient with the cooler coast, a dynamic that peaks in May and June.
And how we measure wind matters, too. As Bay Area meteorologist Jan Null notes, wind observations became automated in the early 2000s, replacing decades of manually eyeballing when the anemometer hit its peak. That suggests the long-term data should be viewed with some caution.
Still, if you've felt like it's been windier than usual this year, you're probably not wrong. And you're definitely not alone.
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Buzz Feed
5 days ago
- Buzz Feed
People Are Sharing Scary Stories About Where They Live
Have you ever had a feeling someone's watching you or lurking about? That disaster could happen at any moment? You get a gut feeling that something's very wrong? Well, someone on Reddit asked people what the most horrifying parts about where they lived are, and they had some answers. Here are some of the most disturbing stories from the replies: "I live out in the country, on a quiet dirt road surrounded by woods. My nearest neighbor is a five-minute drive away, so I've always thought of this place as isolated and peaceful. But recently, I've had a couple of unsettling experiences. Twice now, I've caught two different people emerging from the woods and looking into my house." "It makes me wonder how many times this has happened without me knowing. My dog often goes into a barking frenzy at what I assume is nothing, but now I'm not so sure. I'm starting to realize I might not be as alone out here as I times I've seen the strangers, they've come from the backside of my property. There are no roads out there, just miles of untouched land. So either they're making a long, quiet loop from the dirt road, staying far enough away that even my dog doesn't hear them, or they're coming from somewhere back there. I'm not sure which possibility is worse.I used to be afraid of all the usual things before I moved out to the country. Ticks that carry disease, a few venomous snakes around here that could kill you, some aggressive wildlife you'd rather not cross paths with. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and being too far for anyone to save me. But after living here for a while, I've realized it's not nature I fear most, it's act on instinct, not malice. Nature doesn't discriminate; it just is. But people? People show up with intention. And too often, that intention feels like harm."—Careless_Day_3506"This is the first entry that raised my eyebrows. Snakes, ticks, and tornadoes are all scary, but precautions can be taken. People emerging from the woods to look in your house is a scene from a horror movie."—purdyp13 "100+ years ago, the slaughterhouses in Chicago dumped so much of their waste into the Chicago river that there is a portion of the river that is still bubbling today because there are piles of rotten meat remaining at the bottom." "Edit: Even more horrible, don't look up what happened to the fat that floated to the top of the river back in the day."—ChiAnndego"It says that the part of the river where this occurs, the river bed is covered in 8 to 18 feet of animal carcasses and other stuff. Holy shit. Edit: I found a video from 6 years ago. It looks nasty."—Netsuko"Bubbly creek! Chicago basically invented the factory farm with their pig slaughterhouses. They'd dump the waste products in the river, and the gases from the decomposition made the water bubble. That's the part of the river that still bubbles, though there's been some restoration work to it in recent years to clean it back up. It's mentioned in The Jungle and Devil in The White City."—roccotheraccoon "I live in a neighborhood, but basically behind my house, two minutes out there is this river in a thick forest. We call it Rapid, real original name, I know. One of our buddies had gone alone to Rapid about three months ago and came back terrified. He told us he saw these people in the woods wearing strange clothing. Apparently, they didn't notice him, and he was far enough away." "Naturally, me and the boys didn't believe him. He was so adamant about the story even weeks later. Eventually, we finally cracked. So a few weeks later, the five of us, including him, went out late at night around 1 a.m. to go to Rapid. It's pretty easy to get there because it's a natural path we've created after so many years of get there. We are at the river side where we usually hang. And I'm not even joking, on the other side of the river, there is a man-made campfire with about six people surrounding it, standing. Our buddy was right, they wore weird clothing, almost like deer skin. The craziest part about that whole thing is that they had a severed deer head with antlers on a tell you we hightailed it so fast out of there. We called the police that same night to hopefully investigate the situation. They did, and went into the woods with us. They found nothing. The people were gone.A month and a half ago, our local town police arrested 12 individuals. Apparently, it was a small cult that had been killing most of the bucks in the area, and they were allegedly living in the haven't been back to Rapid since."—Alchemiist7 "I have a friend who lives in a town nearby and likes to take her dog for a walk along the riverbank. She's so far found several washed-up people and several people trying to commit suicide by jumping into the river." "The last time she found a washed-up body, she and another passerby actually had a brief discussion where she politely asked the guy to call the police because she's already done it so many times that it was starting to look suspicious even to her."—Daemonicvs_77 "The number of people who underestimate Lake Michigan and drown every single year, year-round." "Lake Michigan is HUGE, and it has its own currents, including the undertow, which every kid in this region has been taught to avoid at all costs and to swim diagonally to try to get out of it if they do get caught in people underestimate it, either because they're tourists who have never experienced a Great Lake, or it's people from the region who think they know better because 'I've been on this lake my whole life, it's fine.' Even in the winter, people will walk on the ice shelves WITH THEIR YOUNG KIDS. If you fall through the ice shelf, good luck getting out before you get hypothermia and drown. It's horrifying how many people do not respect the danger of the Great Lakes."—True_Panic_3369"I remember one summer on Lake Michigan, watching the Coast Guard helicopters go back and forth along about a ten-mile stretch of shoreline all day. All day. Turns out that those riptides claimed seven people in one day along that stretch."—londuc "I work at an alfalfa farm up in Arizona with an inmate crew out in the middle of nowhere (9 p.m.-7 a.m.). We see rattlesnakes and javelinas every night, and random mountain lion sightings. If any of us were to be bitten or attacked, medical response would more than likely be too late for any of us to survive." —birdman760 "High desert of California: dead bodies keep being found throughout the desert. Cops just say 'man/woman/child found deceased.'" "There are a few houses further out with injured wandering dogs, high fences, and abandoned grow ops. The desert as a whole is creepy once you get to the less populated areas. The stories I've heard make me wonder if we have a serial killer somewhere out there."—Pleasant-Mouse949 "Wildfires are a pretty serious reality right now in Canada, and I live in a city that is literally carved into a forest. For the past decade, the smell of smoke in the air has been a common thing in the summer. It's a scary reminder of the distant but not too distant fires burning away. There have been times when the smoke lasts for days or even weeks. When this occurs, a subtle mounting fear begins to take hold as there's no escaping it." "Even without the smoke, the looming threat is always finding ways to make itself known. As a major evacuation centre for the region, I will often drive past refugee camps for the various communities that had to bail out. Some of them have homes to return to, others don't. Every year, it seems like there's at least one significant community impacted. I don't know if we can anticipate insurance to be able to keep up. And what then? I'm only 37, and I presumably have 40-50 years left on this planet. I'm left pondering the odds and I feel it's very unlikely that I won't be forced to flee for my life as well."—Regnes "Valley Fever. It's a million-year-old fungal spores that live in the dirt. If you inhale the dust, the spores activate in your lungs and you get chronic fungal infections for life." —the-software-man "The Strid. A very narrow section of a river in Yorkshire. It's deceptively dangerous. It almost looks like you could step across it, but both banks are covered in slick, mossy rocks, and if you fall into the water, you will be instantly sucked under by the currents, washed into any one of dozens of underwater tunnels or caves, and you will never be seen again." —Far_Mycologist_5782 "The urban legend of the Candlestick man. In Ballarat (Rural Victoria, Australia) in the 90s, there was a serial prowler who would break and enter using a candlestick as his source of light. You often only found out you were a victim of his crime due to the dripping of wax on the carpet next to your bed." —Masian "The summer power outages. They started about 10 years ago or so, the grid would get overwhelmed, and entire neighborhoods would go dark." "The first year it happened, every power outage was met with comments about it. Everyone complaining, neighbors yelling, 'YOU GUYS TOO OR JUST US?' 'WE'RE DARK HERE TOO!' 'SAME HERE! THOUGHT I TRIPPED A BREAKER THANKS NEIGHBOR.' Chatter, activity, just without power. A couple of years went by, with Summer outages, and the comments became more scattered. It stopped being a noteworthy event. Just another one. No neighbors interacting. No people sitting outside anymore. No one taking advantage to grill instead. I just bought backup power and small solar panels to keep things going when it inevitably then a new neighbor moved in last year with a baby and a dog. The power went out as usual. She freaked out, alone with a baby. She came knocking on my door while I was home alone. It was past sunset, so it was pitch black, and she was scared, standing on my porch with her phone flashlight, baby in a carrier, as she asked what was going on. No one else had opened the door for her, no one responded to the knocking and the calling out. Her dog looked uneasy. I asked if she needed anything, all she wanted was to know what was happening. I told her it was just one of the summer power didn't hit me until that interaction that every summer, for hours at a time, my neighborhood just accepts not having power. It's like the whole neighborhood gets turned off. We're ready for it and we don't bother asking each other about it. When people move in and it happens to them, they're met with silence about it. If the new neighbor hadn't had a baby with her, I'm not sure if I would've answered the door. I'm not suspicious of people in general, but when the power goes out I already assume everyone knows and is home dealing with it, so a stranger showing up is immediately unwelcome and suspect. All my neighbors have said the same. Usually, we're pretty chill with people knocking on our doors, but when the power goes out in the summer, we regard them differently. Even known neighbors. Why are they out there, it can't be the power outage, something must be wrong."—PhantomIridescence "My town has been around since New Jersey was a colony. There are lots of historic homes and places around town, but also lots of old stories. There are numerous stories of homes being haunted, with what I would consider proof." "I have a friend who claimed their house was haunted. They and their family lived in the house for over 200 years. The first known person to live in the house was the son of a famous writer. The home was a two-story mansion, but it's now a one-story, and I'll get to why. All the families reported similar things happening in the house and on the property. My friend said her son was sick in his room one day. She was working in the kitchen when she decided to go check on her son in his room. It was just the two of them in the house. She checked on him, everything was fine, and when she returned to the kitchen, every single cabinet door was wide open. Strange, right? But all the families that lived there all said one thing: at night, if they looked out the front window, they would see a gray figure of a woman. Not a reflection, but a flowing, gray woman outside holding a burning candle. But the house used to be a two-story mansion, and became a one-story. The second floor was taken off by one of the families, and it was because they kept hearing footsteps above, but when they checked, nothing was there. And after the second floor was demolished, the footsteps were gone."—INEEDMEMANSHERB And finally, "There's a big wooded park on the bluffs above the Missouri River. The local rumor is that way back when, people were lynched in this park. Over the years, the park has also been rumored to have become a nocturnal albino colony and a hangout for Satanic worshipers. There's also a creepy 'haunted' staircase in the middle of the woods." "I've driven in the park in the daytime, and though there is a creepy vibe, it is quite pretty with huge trees and great hiking trails. But a friend of mine who grew up here (I didn't grow up here) told me about one time back in the late '80s when she and some college friends were driving through the park at night around Halloween. As they came around a curve, there was a small clearing with a burning mattress just lying there."—CougarWriter74 What story creeped you out the most? Do you have any strange stories about the places you live? Share in the comments below!
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Ahead of the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles launches a program to expand shade across the city
As heat waves grow longer and more intense across Southern California, the absence of shade is becoming a serious public health concern — but vast stretches of Los Angeles remain dangerously exposed. Research shows shaded areas can have a 'heat burden' — a combined measure of temperature, humidity and wind — up to 68–104 degrees less than nearby sun-exposed areas. Quality shade can also reduce UV radiation exposure by up to 75% and help prevent up to 50% of emergency-room visits during heat events. With the 2028 Olympics and other global events set for L.A. on the horizon, a coalition of universities, nonprofits and local agencies has launched ShadeLA, an initiative to expand cooling infrastructure across the city. Led by USC Dornsife Public Exchange — a program that connects researchers with policymakers — and UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation, the project is focused not only on where shade is needed most, but also on how to build it in ways that last. 'The climate that made L.A. so idyllic and attractive in the 20th century is now becoming deadly for many of our neighbors,' said Edith de Guzman, adjunct assistant professor at UCLA's Department of Urban Planning and co-lead on the project. 'And simultaneously, our city is shrinking — because we can use less of it. There are fewer places we can be safely and in a way that meets thermal comfort.' ShadeLA brings together agencies such as L.A. County's Chief Sustainability Office, the County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and a network of nonprofits including City Plants, North East Trees and TreePeople. 'We need a lot of different people coming together to work on the issue,' said Monica Dean, director of the Climate and Sustainability Practice at USC Dornsife Public Exchange and co-lead on the project. 'And we also don't need to just add shade. We also need to take care of and maintain the shade we have.' Unlike many other past greening campaigns around Los Angeles — such as Million Trees LA, which aimed to plant a million trees in a decade — ShadeLA has not set a strict goal for the number of trees or structures it hopes to build. Instead, the initiative emphasizes what it calls 'the quality of shade,' using new high-resolution mapping tools to calculate how much usable, ground-level coverage people actually experience in public spaces where they walk, wait or gather. Those data help participants decide what projects to pursue in order to make the biggest difference, whether that's planting a large-canopy tree on one corner, redesigning a bus stop to provide more overhead cover or creating a pop-up cooling zone in a high-traffic area. Such projects are especially important as Los Angeles starts preparing for the 2028 Olympics, which will draw millions of additional people to the city. 'We're really thinking of the 2028 Games and the preceding mega events as a point of leverage. We're hoping to have those events ... spur Los Angeles to do the right thing and have a legacy,' De Guzman said. That approach builds on the USC Urban Trees Initiative, a five-year research effort that mapped shade gaps across the city and identified specific areas where new trees could have the greatest effect. In Lincoln Heights and Boyle Heights, for example, the study found room for nearly 100 additional trees in Hazard Park, more than 50 at Murchison Street Elementary School, 22 at Hillside Elementary, and over 180 within the Ramona Gardens public housing complex, where residents live next to busy freeways with little natural cover. These areas, researchers say, are among the highest-need zones for planting because they combine high pedestrian activity, low canopy cover and limited access to air conditioning. TreePeople, a longtime leader in Southern California's urban forestry movement, has outlined plans for thousands of new trees in the region — not as part of a citywide quota, but as one piece of ShadeLA's broader push to create high-quality, lasting shade. The group also facilitates volunteer planting events and hosts workshops to teach people how to help the trees survive. As Marcos Trinidad, TreePeople's senior director of forestry, noted, planting trees alone won't solve the problem if the city and Olympic organizers don't commit resources to long-term care. 'What's missing right now is a firm commitment from the city and Olympic organizers — a number, a budget, something we can leverage,' Trinidad said. 'Without that, we risk falling into the same pattern we've seen before, where trees get planted without resources to make sure they survive. We don't want to just put numbers on paper — we want a living, lasting canopy.' Still, he is optimistic about ShadeLA. 'Our hope is that the collaboration will remain and be the vehicle that we can use for increasing canopy shade past the Olympics,' Trinidad said. Ultimately, project leaders hope that the initiative changes how people see the city — leading them to recognize shade not just as a comfort, but also as essential infrastructure for community health and resilience. 'I really want us to start thinking as Angelenos — to sort of train our eyes to see our neighborhoods differently and see where there are opportunities' for shade, Dean said. 'Because the truth is, each of us has some agency and some capacity to be stewards of this civic resource.'
E&E News
25-07-2025
- E&E News
‘Biggest, baddest' rainfall events are getting worse
Texas hill country. Central North Carolina. New Mexico. Chicago. Kansas City. New York. Flash floods have wreaked havoc across the country this summer, transcending geography, topography and the built environment from the rural Southwest to the largest cities in the Midwest and Northeast. The outcomes have been fueled, in each case, by slightly different factors. Hard concrete surfaces in Chicago and New York forced rainwater to pool in the streets or pour into the subways. Wildfire scars near Ruidoso, New Mexico, left the soil loose and vulnerable to floods. Hilly terrain in Kerr County, Texas, sent runoff cascading into the nearby Guadalupe River, which swiftly overflowed its banks. Advertisement But a common ingredient triggered them all: explosions of torrential — and in some cases, record-breaking — rainfall. These heavy precipitation events are among the clearest symptoms of climate change, scientists say. Copious studies warn that they're already happening more often and becoming more intense, and they'll continue to worsen as global temperatures rise. And the most catastrophic rainfall events may be worsening the fastest, some experts say. 'The biggest, baddest, rarest extreme precipitation events are precisely those which are going to increase the most in a warming climate,' Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources, said in a live YouTube talk shortly after the Texas floods struck in July. 'There is really abundant scientific evidence for this at this point.' Intensifying rainfall events are the product of simple physics, scientists explain. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, increasing the odds that moisture-laden clouds will drop rainfall bombs when they burst. That rule has been well established for nearly 200 years. A 19th-century equation known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation — still widely referenced by researchers today — dictates that air can hold about 7 percent more moisture with every degree Celsius of warming. But in recent years, scientists have noticed an alarming trend. Extreme storms in some parts of the world appear to be defying the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, producing far more rainfall as temperatures rise than the equation would predict. One recent study examined the influence of climate change on the unusually active 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. It noted that extreme short-term rainfall rates produced by the 2020 storms appear to have scaled at about twice the rate suggested by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, given that climate change has warmed the Atlantic Ocean basin by as much as 0.9 degrees Celsius. In general, there's increasing evidence that the 'most intense convective downpours — meaning the heaviest torrential rain events from thunderstorms, specifically — are already increasing at a rate that greatly exceeds that of other types of precipitation,' Swain said. It's a phenomenon scientists have dubbed the super-Clausius-Clapeyron rate. Researchers are still investigating the reasons it's happening. At least one recent study, published in April, suggests the trend could be a statistical quirk caused by an increase in the frequency of thunderstorms compared with milder rainfall events. In other words, it's not that the storms themselves are defying established physics — the strongest kinds of storms are just becoming more common. That study focused only on storms in Europe, meaning more research is needed to understand what's happening with rainfall events around the globe. Still, the authors note that rainfall rates are clearly increasing faster than expected in some cases — and that's a trend scientists should account for when making projections for the future. At the same time, researchers have pointed to other ways climate change may be supercharging the worst precipitation events. One recent study warns that long-lasting summer weather patterns, such as extended heat waves or lingering storms, are on the rise — and physical changes in the atmosphere, driven by global warming, may be to blame. When already heavy rainfall events stall in place, they can dump massive volumes of water on a single location, triggering life-threatening floods. Put together, the science suggests that communities should prepare for record-breaking storms and flash flood events to continue worsening across the U.S., researchers warn. These events have been 'significantly underestimated as a hazard in a warming climate,' Swain said in his YouTube talk. 'There's a lot of evidence right now with the most recent science … that these are precisely the kinds of events that are going to increase the most, and in fact already are, and much faster than 'ordinary' precipitation events.'
