AccuWeather California Expert Ken Clark breaks down the potential impacts of Hurricane Hilary as it closes in on the southwestern United States. The storm is expected to weaken to a tropical storm.
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00:00 California expert to King Clark is joining us again. Thank you so much for taking time
00:04 out of your day to talk about a big story here for California and surrounding areas.
00:10 It really is. It's probably the biggest story since the winter snowfalls. And this has been
00:14 quite the season for California. The rarity of the snow and rain we had over the winter
00:19 and now the rarity of a tropical storm will be a tropical storm approaching Southern California.
00:27 We talk about rarity here and first off we're going to take a look again at the satellite
00:31 image that we do have of Hillary. Again a very, very intense, powerful hurricane right
00:36 now. Of course it's over the warm sea surface water temperatures, but we're going to be
00:39 watching this as it moves poleward over the course of the next couple of days and all
00:44 that moisture being drawn to the north. That's right. That's the biggest event with this
00:50 hurricane right now is for Southern California. It's going to be the amount of moisture it
00:55 brings north with it. Incredible amounts of moisture in a great depth of the atmosphere.
01:00 And this is going to bring with it quite a bit of rain, significant rain and a significant
01:04 flooding potential for a large portion of Southern California. You know we talk about
01:09 the rarity here just backpedaling for just a second. And you know this has been a long
01:13 time since we've been talking about the potential here for a landfalling tropical system. But
01:19 you know I still want to bring to the forefront the impact from the wet weather. But looking
01:23 behind me here, we've seen very few occurrences of again something of this magnitude to the
01:28 north, right? And there's a reason for that. It's all the very cool waters off the coast
01:32 of California all the year long. So these systems weakened considerably as they approach
01:38 Southern California. This is not going to be an exception to this one either. It's going
01:42 to happen. We just don't know how quickly it's going to happen. We do expect tropical
01:47 storm force winds up an extreme northern Baja, whether they make it into San Diego County
01:52 or not. That's a little bit of a question mark, but it could happen. But that's not
01:56 the biggest threat we have. You know we were just talking about this a second ago. We were
02:01 talking about the precipitable water values. So much moisture here. And in some cases these
02:05 values as they move into California off the charts. They are off the charts. We are looking
02:11 at potentially some of the highest levels of water in the air mass that we've ever seen
02:17 across Southern California. It's going to certainly approach record values. All right,
02:21 so let's get into the details here as we talk about those impacts. And we're talking about,
02:26 you know, an arid zone. We're talking about the mountainous terrain, you know, mountains
02:30 8 to 10,000 feet. And then again, of course, we have highly populated zones here down below
02:35 those mountains. So talk about the impacts here with this much rain coming into an area
02:40 that doesn't typically experience that much at all this time of the year. Well, this time
02:44 of year, there's very little rainfall that occurs across much of California, California
02:49 itself, and especially across Western California, less than a couple of hundreds of an inch
02:55 on average during the month of August. And even across the summer, it's very low values.
03:01 This one could bring record amounts of rainfall, not only for days, but also for the month
03:07 across Southern California. We're looking on average 2 to 4 inches of rain all across
03:11 Southern California. There could be as much as 6, 7, 8 inches of rain in some of the east
03:17 slopes of the Southern California mountains and also the Western deserts. And you got
03:21 to remember the average rainfall in Palm Springs all year, it's just over 5 inches. They could
03:28 be approaching those values as we get into the next couple of days. You know, that really
03:34 puts it into perspective. And we still want to again also mention there will be some wind
03:39 lifting off to the north as well, coming into that with the combination of all the wet weather.
03:44 Well, there will be wind. I expect tropical storm force winds across the mountains, especially
03:49 San Diego County, up into parts of Orange County and even up into San Bernardino County.
03:54 There will be tropical storm force winds for a time. The second thing I wanted to bring
04:00 up here is let's not forget about coastal flooding. I expect it to be a considerable
04:05 amounts of coastal flooding and beach erosion, especially on the south facing beaches, all
04:10 the way from San Diego County, all the way north to Santa Barbara. So this is really
04:15 a triple impact. We've got the rainfall, no doubt about it, rare. The wind, which is going
04:21 to be a problem for a time and could cause some damage itself. And then we have the coastal
04:26 flooding, which is going to be substantial in some areas.
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