Armed with a video from viewers and model/radar data, Southern California Weather Force has officially called that a tornado did move through the Los Angeles Coast and Basin on December 28, 2020, so read on for details.
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Southern California Weather Force viewer Jason Goldfischer caught a video of the tornado moving through his yard in Long Beach on December 28, 2020. The video starts out with breezy conditions, ramping up in only a few seconds. A swirl can be seen moving directly over the camera… then the wind slows down. This is indicative of a weak tornado of EF0. You can even see the rotation at the surface with the leaves. Regardless of what looks like a 30 mph ground circulation, it still is considered a tornado.
Tornadoes are highly common in this area. A convergence boundary exists in the Long Beach areas with any systems that can produce tornadoes in our area. In fact, the Los Angeles and Orange County Basin believe it or not is Southern California’s tornado alley. We get onshore flow from storms forming the Catalina Eddy. This eddy brings in a southerly flow below the west to the east moving jet stream, providing the localized low-level shear for tornadoes to form.
Here at Southern California Weather Force the wording was plain as day that this system had waterspout to weak tornado potential along our coast and inland as well. This cell produced the SCWF Tornado Warning afterward in the La Palma areas. It is highly possible that it did keep producing surface rotation along the path, similar to what was seen in Long Beach on the video.
The short video can be seen on this link by clicking here and seeing the warning issued –
Keep in mind that it only furthers my theory that 90% of the tornadoes in Southern California go without reports. They do happen more than one thinks. I am officially labeling this as a tornado in the books.
For the final forecast for that event in archives, Click here
December looked like it would be super dry, having no rain all month. But, we closed out the month with a single storm dropping 2″ of rainfall, right as expected. So what we seem to be in is a three to four-week storm pattern. One system locking to the west of here in the blocking pattern would be enough to ramp of values. We still have a lot of days left for this to happen. Following the pattern, January will be the same, with a returning storm pattern near the last week of the month. Other than that, it will be quiet.
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