We don’t want to start a panic, but SNOW IS COMING TO LONG BEACH!
Perhaps. Probably not. Let’s not get all worked up over nothing. Still, you never know. Climatewise, it’s a wacky world these days. And we can get snow here, though admittedly it’s not an every-decade occurrence. In fact, snow-wise, we’re in a nearly 75-year drought right now.
The National Weather Service has issued a rare blizzard warning —its first for this area, according to the NWS—for much of the LA County mountains and foothills this Friday, with fierce winds of up to 55 mph and zero visibility in areas above 4,000 feet, where up to 5 feet of snow is expected, with that total dwindling to 1 or 2 inches of snow as low as 1,000 feet.
The National Weather Service does not expect snowfall in Long Beach, but, then, no one ever expects snowfall in Long Beach. And yet, it has unexpectedly but unofficially snowed in Long Beach, even in fairly modern times, even though whatever stuff whitish in hue that has landed here has been a source of argument, with killjoy Monday morning climatologists calling it pea hail or some other snowlike precipitation, but not snow.
The most recent frigid event in Long Beach that the NWS has deigned to call snow came in mid-January 1949, when an arctic blast from Alberta, Canada made it down to Long Beach, bringing temperatures down to 32 degrees at Long Beach Airport, where airport workers had to scrape the frost off the wings of airplanes while elsewhere in the city kids managed to scrape enough snow together to make ammo for snowball fights or to build diminutive snowman.
Long Beach’s best bet on Friday at snagging some snow is at its highest point, 417 feet at the roof of Shoreline Gateway apartments, which is 56 feet higher than Signal Hill, the closest thing our area can come to a mountain, at 361 feet.
Even without snow, you can expect wintery weather with rain Thursday through Saturday and low temperatures in the mid-to-high 40s.
And, on the off chance that Long Beach does get some snow, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Heavy winds cause downed utility lines, trees across Long Beach
