El Niño and Storm Season Discussion

After years of drought there are many roof leaks that have gone unseen. A heavy winter storm season can reveal leaks you might not know you had!

La Niña

La Niña is developing in the Pacific. Whereas El Niño is marked by hotter sea surface temperatures, La Niña comes around when sea surface temperature averages go below the normal levels. We'll be tracking La Niña in the coming months. Next month we'll be doing a piece on heat expansion of roof membranes, how everyday weather affects roofing.

Photo Lessons

Instead of writing down our invaluable knowledge for you to absorb, we put up a set of photos highlighting some of the crazier things we saw during these storms. Click on each image to zoom in. A few things to think about as you look them over:

• Was this preventable? Many leaks we see are preventable, roof maintenance items. Roof maintenance doesn't solve every problem but many can be addressed before they cause interior damage and owner/tenant stress.
• Can this damage be tarped? As we covered last month, often the lack of a slope or the design of the building makes it impossible to tarp an area.
• Are there previous, poorly performed repairs? When you see these you know the wrong company serviced this property, gave them sub-par service and was betting on California weather to keep them from getting caught.

Weather History

It may sound boring but it can be both fun and useful. Many websites allow you to look up the history for any location, showing interesting information such as record high temperatures or record low rain fall.

January 2010 we saw 5.46 in (Laguna Hills) which is way more than we've had these past few years:

• 2009: 0.14 in
• 2008: 2.45 in
• 2007: 0.06 in
• 2006: 0.62 in
• 2005: 5.78 in

Thats the most rain we've had in a January in 5 years!

Here at Fontaine Weatherproofing we use historical data for various reasons. One reason is to help plan roof work, for instance; foothill communities often get monsoon rains in August, something you might not know unless you live there or look it up. Some communities get extraordinarily high winds, those communities might get extreme gusts during a Santa Ana wind event whereas other communities might not get any extreme gusts. Wind speed directly affects roofing as all roof top equipment and roof materials are rated to withstand various wind speeds. If you want to know if a property you manage is in a high wind area, just look it up online at any weather website, enter the zip code then click on History. All this information is available to any community or manager and can help you choose a roof and a roofer by being well informed.

El Niño Update

ONI is now at 1.5°C. The sharp increase from last month is holding steady, bringing the average up.

Next month we will be reviewing some of the more dramatic leaks we inspected in January (of the over 1000 leak calls we received)

Winter is here but we're not in the clear!

Southern California is a desert. Besides creating roof leak emergencies, rain is desperately needed for agriculture and drinking water.

We’ve had a few storms so far but we are still very far below average for the year. This month is looking pretty good but we must remember that a little rain doesn’t pull us out of a drought.

The winter is a great time to adjust your water usage; saving money and conserving water. After a strong storm most plants can go days without further watering. Ask your local horticulturist for more information. You can use your roof and gutters to collect rain in a cistern or water tank. Use that water when the rain stops. These two methods can give you weeks of free winter watering.

The weather is changing, the storms are coming but the drought is still here!

El Niño Update

ONI is now at 1.2°C. A sharp increase in sea surface temperatures from ~.5°C up to ~1.5°C over the last 2 months, in some areas, has raised the 3 month average. As predicted, the phenomenon is continuing to increase in strength.

Happy Holidays!

Where do you get your weather?

Local news, weather.com, National Weather Service, none of the above?

Every morning I hear the same thing:
It’s 76° degrees at LAX, 84° at Burbank Airport, 74° at John Wayne Airport, 68° at Lindberg Field… and it goes on. Do you live next to the Airport? Convenient if you do. But, for the rest of us we might want something a bit more local.

Weather Underground uses a vast network of internet enabled amateur and professional weather stations. This lets me get up-to-the-minute temperature, wind, dew point, humidity, precipitation, etc. for any community. There are about 20 of these personal weather stations (PWS) within just a few miles of our offices. I can look at the temperature here at Fontaine Weatherproofing’s offices in Laguna Hills and see how much cooler it would be if I were on the beach at Lake Mission Viejo. Dreaming of the lake is nice, but these PWS’ can provide a great service to our industry.

Santa Ana Winds, or Devil Winds, are a huge nuisance to building owners. They can blow equipment off roofs and the strong gusts can blow components of your roof, such as tile or flat membranes, right off. Various roofing is rated to withstand a specified wind speed. With Weather Underground’s network of PWS’ we were able to definitively tell a customer that their community experienced gusts of wind exceeding their roof’s rating. But winds aren't the only micro-climate issue. During monsoon season we track the rouge rain storms that fly across the Southland and can DUMP rain on unsuspecting communities.

Check out their WunderMap, it uses Radar, National Weather Service information and the network of Personal Weather Stations all on a Google Maps overlay; you can customize it and animate it. Have fun.

El Niño Update

Quick update: As you know, El Niño is here. The ONI (discussed last month) is now at 0.9° Celsius, up a little from last month. There has been a bit of a temperature spike recently, if it holds up we might see a much stronger El Niño this winter.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Long term forecasting

Long term forecasting of precipitation is a fairly ridiculous venture. Have you heard something like this “we can predict the tides but we cannot predict the individual waves” as an analogy for long term forecasting of weather events and climate change?

The Old Farmer’s Almanac (1792) and the Farmer’s Almanac (1818) are very old resources. Each uses its own proprietary formula along with current scientific data to predict weather. They both claim 80% or higher accuracy in extremely long range predictions. Not knowing how they make these predictions stops any discussion of them, however, we can see (Figure 1) that one is calling for above average rain in December, March and April and then below average for the rest of the year. Both make extremely descriptive forecasts, if not necessarily precise. For instance, “Oct 9-14: Sunny, turning hot;” (The Old Farmer’s Almanac), it rained that week. The Farmer’s Almanac has a Winter Outlook with broad claims such as “drier-than-normal conditions are forecast to occur over the Southwest”. I personally don’t pay attention to these resources. Let’s look at what the man has to say about the weather.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has products showing long term precipitation outlooks. Namely the 3 Month Outlook (Figure 2). Figure 1 has the Nov-Dec-Jan 3 Month Outlook for precipitation, they also have one for temperature. The NOAA makes broad seasonal predictions in terms of Above, Normal or Below average. They are calling for an above average rainfall for the next 3 months in our area.

Another product they create yearly (released mid-October) is the NOAA 2009 Winter Outlook (Figure 3), click to read their entire article. The Winter Outlook calls for 33% chance of higher than average rainfall in the Southland and 40% in most of California. “California: A slight tilt in the odds toward wetter-than-average conditions over the entire state.” Why? “Warmer ocean water in the equatorial Pacific shifts the patterns of tropical rainfall that in turn change the strength and position of the jet-stream and storms over the Pacific Ocean and the U.S.” That warmer ocean water is El Niño, which brings us to our El Niño update.

"California: A slight tilt in the odds toward wetter-than-average conditions over the entire state."

El Niño Update

Last month we looked at rainfall from previous El Niño events, what we didn’t include is the ONI value. The current ONI, that is the measurement of Niño 3.4 Region (central equatorial Pacific Ocean) averaged over 3 months, is at .8 degrees Celsius. Well what does that mean? 1998’s rainfall was >250% above average and had a maximum ONI of 2.5. It hit that maximum in Oct-Nov-Dec average. At this time of the year it was 2.0, we are at .08 right now. According to last month’s discussion, that would indicate that higher precipitation could or could not be due to El Niño… how exciting.

Next month I’ll cover some useful features of my favorite weather website, Weather Underground, wunderground.com.

2010 El Niño

Each week the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) releases updated data on El Niño, the warming of the oceans which has been associated with droughts, Atlantic Hurricane seasons and above average rain in the otherwise temperate and dry Southern California.

In the last couple of months I've heard a lot of hype concerning El Niño; usually claims it will create heavy rainfall in our area. Over the last few decades a strong El Niño has coincided with above average rain fall. However, above average rain fall happens seemingly randomly, with or without El Niño. Likewise, when a mild El Niño happens, it usually has no discernible effect on our weather. The graph at right, from SFSU, shows grey bars (none El Niño years) with high rain fall, showing there isn't a constant correlation between El Niño and rain fall.

As a weatherproofing contractor, understanding So Cal's weather patterns is necessary for scheduling projects, anticipating increased leak calls, etc. but it is far too unreliable to say "this year is El Niño, we WILL have more rain." Managing roofs is not about taking risks like that.

Managing roofs is about keeping the elements outside and protecting what we keep inside; our families, our possessions and our businesses... the things we can't take risks with. We are huge proponents of preventative maintenance and long-term re-roof budgeting. These are costs that you can foresee and keep on top of from day 1 of owning or managing a building. Fontaine Weatherproofing can help! We work with our clients to develop long term maintenance and replacement plans. Over the years we collect data about the roofs we work on that help us analyze each roof's needs.

Next month we'll get an El Niño update and compare The Old Farmer's Almanac precipitation outlook to the NOAA's.