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One of the biggest misconceptions about LA by non Angelenos is that LA is in a dry desert. That's very far from the truth. The areas which are in a desert in Los Angeles county are Palmdale and Lancaster. But the rest of Los Angeles Country is mostly either a coastal plain or chapparal in the Hills. Here's why.
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The city is situated in a Mediterranean climate or Dry-Summer Subtropical zone (Köppen climate classification Csb on the coast, Csa inland), USDA Zones 9-11, experiencing mild, somewhat wet winters and warm to hot summers.
Breezes from the Pacific Ocean tend to keep the beach communities of the Los Angeles area cooler in summer and warmer in winter than those further inland; summer temperatures can sometimes be as much as 18 °F (10 °C) warmer in the inland communities compared to that of the coastal communities. A few coastal "micro-climates" have never recorded a temperature below freezing.
Coastal areas also see a phenomenon known as the "marine layer," a dense cloud cover caused by the proximity of the ocean that helps keep the temperatures cooler throughout the year. When the marine layer becomes more common and pervades farther inland during the months of May and June, it is called May Gray or June Gloom.
Echo Park, as seen with Lotus Plants and Palm Trees.
Echo Park, as seen with Lotus Plants and Palm Trees. Temperatures in the summer can get well over 90 °F (32 °C), but average summer daytime highs in downtown are 82 °F (27 °C), with overnight lows of 63 °F (17 °C).
Winter daytime high temperatures will get up to around 65 °F (18 °C), on average, with overnight lows of 48 °F (10 °C) and during this season rain is common. The warmest month is August, followed by July and then September.
This somewhat large case of seasonal lag is caused by Los Angeles' proximity to the ocean and its latitude of 34° north. The median temperature in January is 57 °F (13 °C) and 73 °F (22 °C) in August. The highest temperature recorded within city borders was 119.0 °F (48.33 °C) in Woodland Hills on July 22, 2006; the lowest temperature recorded was 18.0 °F (−7.8 °C) in 1989, in Canoga Park.
The highest temperature recorded for Downtown Los Angeles was 112.0 °F (44.4 °C) on June 26, 1990, and the lowest temperature recorded was 24.0 °F (−5.0 °C) on January 9, 1937. Rain occurs mainly in the winter and spring months (February being the wettest month), with great annual variations in storm severity.
Los Angeles averages 15 inches (38 cm) of precipitation per year. Snow is extraordinarily rare in the city basin, but the mountainous slopes within city limits typically receive snow every year. The greatest snowfall recorded in downtown Los Angeles was 2.0 inches (5 cm) on January 15, 1932.
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t was probably inevitable that people would think of Los Angeles as a desert. I mean, I get it. You grow up someplace like Massachusetts, where water falls out of the sky once a week and makes rivers a half mile across that never dry up, where there's so much moisture in the air that it's hard to see more than two miles away even if the view wasn't blocked by a wall of green, which it always is.
And then you come out to the California coast, with its brown summer hills and rivers that a housecat could leap without wetting her feet, where you actually have to water your lawn to keep it alive. I grew up in the Great Lakes and came west in my 20s. I understand the temptation to call Los Angeles a desert. I really do.
And it doesn't help that "Chinatown," the canonical artistic paean to Los Angeles, a film that is in fact about as Los Angeles as a film can be, contains this oration just a few minutes into Act One:
Gentlemen, today you can walk out that door, turn right, hop on a streetcar and in twenty-five minutes end up smack in the Pacific Ocean. Now you can swim in it, you can fish in it, you can sail in it but you can't drink it, you can't water your lawns with it, you can't irrigate an orange grove with it. Remember we live next door to the ocean but we also live on the edge of the desert. Los Angeles is a desert community. Beneath this building, beneath every street there's a desert. Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we'd never existed!
Makes sense. And yet there are two important facts to keep in mind when deciding whether to use this soliloquy from "Chinatown" as a basis for your climatic classification of the Los Angeles basin:
"Chinatown" is a work of fiction.
The person speaking the above lines in that work of fiction, fictional former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Bagby, is speaking to drum up support for a shady dam and aqueduct deal, and it can reasonably be assumed that his speech was written as hyperbole.
Screenwriter Robert Towne intended "Chinatown" as a broad satire of the real-life California Water Wars, and he borrowed the hyperbole faithfully. Though Los Angeles' earliest promoters extolled the young city for the abundance of its water, it became clear well before the end of the 19th century that the basin's braided rivers and native cienegas wouldn't support the kind of grandiose development speculation L.A.'s founding fathers had in mind.
As retired Cal Poly Pomona professor Ralph Shaffer has documented, the predominant PR portrayal of Los Angeles shifted suddenly from "L.A. as Eden" more toward the desert Eden became After the Fall. As Shaffer wrote in a rejected 2003 Op-Ed submitted to the Los Angeles Times (and kindly saved from history's dustbin by Kevin Roderick at LA Observed);
In support of legislation in the 1880s to divert river water for the purpose of irrigation, [Times magnate Harrison Gray] Otis reprinted an article from San Francisco's Alta California that characterized opponents as "in favor of restoring Southern California to its primeval condition of wilderness and desert," abandoning it to "the lizard, horned toad and burning sun." No doubt a bit of Bay Area snobbery was involved in the Alta's description, but Otis knew a winning argument when he read one. He resurrected it two decades later to coax voters into supporting the Owens Valley aqueduct bonds. Over the years the "Los Angeles is a desert" theme has appeared regularly in The Times. Columnists, reporters, editors, politicians and op-ed writers all pushed the idea. A quarter century ago Remi Nadeau, quoted in the recent editorial, wrote in an op-ed piece that "Los Angeles is by far the largest city ever built in a desert."
Some proponents of the Los Angeles as desert meme pulled out all the stops in their rhetoric. Witness this effusive 1886 letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times via Shaffer's site, a response to the state Supreme Court's decision in Lux v. Haggin that California water rights followed English Common Law, thus granting priority in water rights to landowners along the riverbanks:
Is there any bar at all between our beautiful homes, our orange groves and vineyards, and ruin and destruction, save our own strong right arms and faithful Winchesters? Why may not Pasadena again be relegated to her primeval condition as a first-class pasture ranch for the festive jack rabbit and the baa-ing sheep? What is to prevent Los Angeles from once more becoming the favorite breeding place of the frisky squirrel, and the plaintive ground-owl? ... "It's English, you know," this decision, and we ought not to complain. What shall prevent the impoverished descendants of some of the old Conquistadores from returning the waters of the Santa Ana to their original bed, wherewith to quench the thirst of a few miserable bovines and broncos, and burros. Riverside and Anaheim, and Orange and Santa Ana, would perish from the face of the earth, but it would be in accordance with law -- as at present defined by a majority of our Supreme Court. Dust and desert they were a few short years since, and to dust and desert they may return.
Despite the booster propaganda as it echoes down through the ages, Los Angeles is no desert. It is not even, as some more cautious observers would have it, "semi-arid." At least not under the most commonly used system of climate classification, the Köppen system, in use in one form or another since before the above letter-writer predicted a jackrabbit Reconquista on Colorado Boulevard. Under the Köppen system, Los Angeles and its surround are classified as possessing a Mediterranean climate, along with much of the rest of Coastal California and much of the Pacific Northwest.
Some of the confusion is due to the shifting definition of the word "desert." There was a time, two hundred years ago, when people used the word to mean any land that had no forest cover. Much of Nebraska qualified as desert under this definition, and in fact the High Plains were referred to as the Great American Desert through much of the 19th Century, despite the presence of lush waist-high prairie grasses in thick sods running for hundreds of miles in all directions.
One common definition of "desert" centers on potential evapotranspiration: if the amount of moisture that could potentially evaporate exceeds the amount of precipitation, then the region is a desert under that definition. Under this definition, some parts of the L.A. basin could be considered deserts in exceptionally hot dry years. And so could parts of Madagascar that get 24 inches of rain a year, more than Oakland generally gets.
These days, many biogeographers hew to the definition of desert advanced by scientist Peveril Meigs, in which a place is considered a desert if it receives less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. It's not a perfect definition of a desert; Meigs' definition would exclude Tucson, for instance, a canonical desert city if ever there was one.
The more we learn about deserts, the more we realize that there may never be a simple metric to that allows us to draw a precise boundary between desert and non-desert. What we do know is that deserts are characterized by extremes rather than averages; that there's something in the environment -- periods of drought, high temperatures, saline soils, or a combination of several such factors -- that make living there difficult. A piece of the Mojave desert may average 12 inches of rain a year, but that average may consist of one year with 36 inches and several on either side with no precipitation at all. Temperatures may average in the 60s but peak at 127 and bottom out at 20 below. The desert is a place where native organisms either survive extremes, or they don't survive at all.
There are extremes to be had in Los Angeles, but they mainly involve either wealth or competitive sports. One day in September 2010 the temperature in Los Angeles maxed out at 113, and it was news across the country. A hundred miles east, we've had temperatures above that for the last few days, but CNN is strangely absent from the scene. When non-cultural extremes take place in Los Angeles, people notice and talk about them for years... which pretty much excludes L.A. from consideration as a desert by definition.
Where the natural vegetation of Los Angeles remains, it survives predictable cycles. The chaparral plants have adapted ways to survive periodic fires, and now and then they have to put those skills to use. But the toyons in the hills predictably survive the predictable dry seasons, the bunchgrasses set seed in anticipation of wet autumns that almost always come, and marine layer fogs reliably cool the city in June when actual deserts start to climb above triple-digit temperatures.
That's not a desert we're talking about. That's paradise with taco trucks.
This is some of the unbuilt areas of LA County. This doesn't look like the IE or Las Vegas to me.
I've been screaming this for years. What I realize is that people bent on finding something negative will only listen to the negative stuff then regurgitate it no matter how inaccurate it is. LA is green man. It's hilly and it's green. People just love to hate on it.
I forgive anyone who was driving about around Rancho Cucamonga and looked up and saw green mountains while driving through an area that looked suspiciously like a desert.
FYI I've lived in Phoenix and have driven about the high desert (CA City, Mojave, Boron, Ridgecrest, and many dirt roads with a mobile home at the end of them) for work as we covered all of Kern County and anywhere else the manager in Reno didn't want to send his man in Bishop to. That and sometimes the San Bernardino office would get swamped and I'd end up most of the way to Victorville covering for them.
I forgive anyone who was driving about around Rancho Cucamonga and looked up and saw green mountains while driving through an area that looked suspiciously like a desert.
FYI I've lived in Phoenix and have driven about the high desert (CA City, Mojave, Boron, Ridgecrest, and many dirt roads with a mobile home at the end of them) for work as we covered all of Kern County and anywhere else the manager in Reno didn't want to send his man in Bishop to. That and sometimes the San Bernardino office would get swamped and I'd end up most of the way to Victorville covering for them.
I've also lived in San Dimas and Ontario. /shrug
I guess I sort of missed the point you are trying to make here--so do you think Rancho Cucamonga is in a desert or not in a desert?
Even the IE isn't a desert for the most part. Maybe far out past Riverside but not the bulk of it. My grandma lives in Rialto and coming from El Paso to visit her I felt like I was in a rainforest.
It's kinda like a desert if you don't irrigate some of those areas of the valley.
For some climatologists, the percipitation boundary between desert and semi-desert is an annual average of ten inches of rain per year.
So, by this definition, the areas around Bakersfield are desert, but virtually none of the LA basin is.
The desert wouldn't really start until past Moreno Valley. (Beaumont, Banning, etc, or over the San Gabriel/San Bernardinos on the north.
I'm glad this issue is being addressed. Not that we're self sufficient in water but a lot of people around here don't get out much or don't look at the landforms and its vegetation around here outside of the cities and subdivisions.
For some climatologists, the percipitation boundary between desert and semi-desert is an annual average of ten inches of rain per year.
So, by this definition, the areas around Bakersfield are desert, but virtually none of the LA basin is.
I have no real quibble with this having lived in Bakersfield. If they didn't irrigate its awful brown most of the year.
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The desert wouldn't really start until past Moreno Valley. (Beaumont, Banning, etc, or over the San Gabriel/San Bernardinos on the north.
I'm glad this issue is being addressed. Not that we're self sufficient in water but a lot of people around here don't get out much or don't look at the landforms and its vegetation around here outside of the cities and subdivisions.
There's not a bright line that says "here be desert" in southern CA. I don't dislike RC, my boss lived there and I'm familiar with it having lived in Ontario. But we did drive around as my wife didn't like sitting at home on weekends and we'd see the occasional yucca tree before we got out to the IE or over the hill to Barstow to go to their outlet shopping mall. Maybe some people consider RC to be IE?
I kinda lump it in with LA as it's pretty continuous city/suburb out to there. /shrug
I lived in Phoenix and we had desert landscape in the frontyard. Cactus and gravel the whole nine yards, so I'm familiar with what some would call "real desert" I guess. It's a bit relative.
I did a paper in AP bio way back when in high school about the Chaparral, since I had no idea what the hell that was, but I really like Mountain Lions (they're the biggest cats that can purr). I find sweet irony that I now live in it, walking by Yucca as I hike every morning. This climate is why Hollywood got so big in the first place -- it was the IDEAL place to shoot western flicks!! So I'd say we owe a great deal to it NOT being a desert city!!
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