Hollywood: snow and rainbows

Photographer Anthony Citrano captured this shot of the Hollywood sign, with bands of snow visible in the sky above, as a rainbow shines in the foreground. Snow and small hail fell in Los Angeles this weekend, with some of the lowest temperatures we've experienced here in recorded history. Oh my god so intense. Follow the photographer on Twitter.

• [geech]

  Great shot ‘trano. He plays well with that there Hollywood sign.

• [scifijazznik]

  Looks like that rainbow ends on top of the church of scientology. Also: in before the global warming deniers.

  Seriously though, I live in Glendale and it’s been really lovely the last couple of days to walk outside my door and see on the mountain.

• [GlenBlank]

  Actually, the overnight low temps didn’t get quite as low as the models were predicting. None of the reporting stations south of the San Gabriels even hit freezing. Nowhere near a record, even for the date.

  OTOH, it definitely did snow at ~600 ft on the floor of the San Fernando Valley. We got about half an inch in northern Studio City, and parts of Burbank got an inch or so. There was just a single train of convective cells popping up off the Santa Monicas and traveling east by northeast over the east Valley. Dusted the Verdugos all sparkly-white in the sunset.

  Not the first time it’s happened – parts of the Valley floor got accumulations of up to a foot back in the late ’40s.

  And, yes, it was snow, not hail. Watched it come floating down. Small crystals and occasional drifts of bigger fluffy flakes. Very delicate.

• [GlenBlank]

  The dark truth, of course, is that it’s LA’s dirty little secret: the weather sucks.

  (For rather pathetically wussy values of “sucks”, of course.)

  • [Anonymous]

    If February is only disappointing because it’s below normal, you have good weather. When an above average February still makes you wonder why the air hates you, then we can talk.

  • [Donald Petersen]

    Wow. I just read Schmidt’s article. And that is one pathetic wuss.

    To my way of thinking, “terrible” weather is the kind that costs lives, destroys property, and makes people wonder why they ever chose to live in such a deadly hellhole. We have earthquakes to serve those ends. We had the merest powdered-sugar-dusting of snow (the first in decades, maybe) while much of the rest of the nation has spent weeks buried under yards of the stuff. We’ve had something like a decent few splashes of rain, but the river has not been in danger of flooding the basin, and I’m still only allowed to water the lawn a couple days a week.

    We have no monsoon season like parts of Arizona. We have no hurricane season like the entire southeast. We have no frozen-solid-ice-storm-snowpocalypse like the northeast and the midwest. We have no tornado season. What do we have? Santa Anas and June Gloom. Scary!

    I’m reminded of some serious L.A. rain that fell during early spring 1992. There’s a gate that stands near where Burbank Boulevard crosses the 405 freeway near the Sepulveda Dam. Burbank Boulevard descends after the gate into a floodplain there, and as the water rose behind the dam that rainy day, the Army Corps of Engineers stationed there wondered when the LAPD or CHP planned on closing the gate. And while the water continued rising, the cops wondered why the Army didn’t close the gate. Eventually the water rose so high that people had to be airlifted off their submerged vehicles on Burbank Blvd, because the gate had never been closed in all its many decades of existence, because the road had never flooded before and nobody could remember who had the authority to close it. The floodplain hadn’t flooded in so long, there were two golf courses built within it.

    Things like that almost qualify as “terrible weather,” but they’re more noteworthy because of their rarity. Here it is now, March 1, three weeks remaining of winter, and it’s sunny and clear and in the high sixties. And not for the first, tenth, or even thirtieth time this year.

    Any of you folks north of the Mason-Dixon line been able to step outside in your shirtsleeves in the last four months?

    Terrible weather in L.A. my cracked ass.

• [Prufrock451]

  It looks like two seasons happening at the same time. Double seasons! Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh god. What does this mean? Oh. Oh my god. Oh. Oh. God.

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Um…yeah

  Double seasons are ok… i guess…if you haven’t seen double planets, that is:

  http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20160-two-planets-found-sharing-one-orbit.html

• [monstrinho_do_biscoito]

  wait, a rainbow in front of land, can that happen, i thought they existed only in the eye and that effect made them effectively infinitely far off.

• [irksome]

  What, no unicorn?

• [Donald Petersen]

  I had heard on Friday that we might see a “light dusting of snow on the Hollywood sign” over the weekend, so I was looking forward to some nifty images.

  But I find myself strangely disappointed. Last August we had record-breaking high temperatures in L.A. which felt just comfortably toasty to me. Did we actually have close to record lows this weekend? I could swear it felt chilly, but not record-stretchingly so. Have I actually become even less sensitive to temperatures in my old age?

  Still, the San Gabriels have been postcard-picturesque as a result. Just as our beaches make decent foregrounds for our sunsets (but aren’t necessarily things you’d want to swim near), we here in L.A. keep our snow sensibly dusted over our nearby mountain ranges, where we don’t have to shovel it, but we can occasionally look at it.

  It’s all image out here.

• [Anonymous]

  That snow / hail must have been at least partially liquid, otherwise a rainbow wouldn’t have formed.

  • [Jean-Luc Turbo]

    I believe the hail was on the Valley side of the hill (the back of the Hollywood sign) while the weather and temperature were different on the city side of the hill, hence the rainbow.

    Just yesterday, there was an icy biting coldness to the air but when I went over to the Valley, it was cold however easily 10 degrees warmer than just a few miles away. What a difference a mountain range going through a city makes.

• [PaulR]

  Oh great, they’ll get 2mm of snow, and they’ll start to call it Snowzilla, or something.

  /Here, at least 160 cm, just for the month of February.

• [Anonymous]

  OMG, it was SO cold here when I went for my bike ride, I ended up wearing my hoodie all the way, when usually I take it off a couple of miles into it. I nearly died.

  • [Donald Petersen]

    I nearly died.

    Our grandkids can’t wait to hear us tell the tale again and again and again…

• [ginablue]

  A different view from yesterday.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/7292011@N04/5486639373/