A far-off hurricane is expected to bring the possibility of light rain and big waves to Southern California beaches over the long Labor Day weekend.
But meteorologists who have spent this week answering frenzied questions about the storm and its path said on Wednesday that it had almost no chance of making landfall in the state.
Here’s what to know about the storm, and why Californians can’t stop talking about it.
Where did all this hype come from?
Long before a hurricane makes landfall, meteorologists use computer models to help them understand the many possible paths a storm might take.
Of the dozens of models run for the system that eventually became Tropical Storm Marie, nearly all of them suggested it would do what storms that form in this region typically do, and head west, away from land.
But earlier this week, before the storm had even formed and been given a name, some outliers suggested the remote possibility that it could head north toward Southern California over the Labor Day weekend. That set off a blizzard of attention even as subsequent models began to show that it was the least likely scenario.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department even put out social media posts on Tuesday, warning people to take precautions and not to underestimate “Tropical Storm El Niño.” (El Niño is the global weather pattern that has helped fuel this year’s especially active Pacific hurricane season.)
“When models are out there, people think the models are just real and everything they’re showing is true, and it’s just not the case,” Robbie Berg, at the National Hurricane Center, said on Tuesday. “It’s just one scenario, one possibility.”
The latest forecast
With the storm still churning out over the open waters of the Pacific on Wednesday, where it goes and how strong it might become were still coming into focus.
“There’s still a lot of uncertainty in the forecast even a few days out, more uncertainty than you’d see in a typical weather forecast,” said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.
And while there was wide agreement among meteorologists and hurricane experts that it would be unlikely that the storm would suddenly take a turn north and hit California, they also warned that even from hundreds of miles away, the storm could still have an impact on the state, especially as people flock to local beaches, from San Diego to Santa Barbara, over the holiday.
The most likely scenario:
Experts said Marie will most likely stay far from the coast of California but still bring muggy weather, light rain and a chance of thunderstorms over the mountains and inland deserts across Southern California.
“There are going to be strong currents, large waves and a ton of people in the water,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the Weather Service Office in Oxnard, Calif.
Marie is also likely to boost humidity levels, with Los Angeles likely to feel like Miami for a few days. That is a not uncommon condition for the city this summer, which has been one of the most humid in recent memory for many residents.
Overall, only between a tenth and a half-inch of rain is expected. But any rain at all is unusual during Southern California’s summers.
The least likely scenario:
If Marie does take the rare path north toward the West Coast, it would be likely to do so as a degraded and quickly weakening system. That would deliver widespread heavy rain with the potential for flooding.
Meteorologists on Wednesday emphasized that with each passing model that is run, this possibility has only grown more unlikely.
“The chances of a Hurricane Marie hitting Southern California is zero,” Mr. Kittell said. “Even if it were to track toward Southern California, by the time it reaches us, the storm would be greatly decayed.”
Hurricanes are extremely rare in California, but not impossible.
A hurricane makes landfall when the center of the storm, the eye, moves onto land. Just as they do in the Atlantic, storms in the Pacific generally move from east to west, which means Pacific storms are far less likely to run into land. They do sometimes hit Mexico and Hawaii.
Only one storm in the modern era has maintained tropical storm strength as it reached land in Southern California. The unnamed 1939 storm moved on shore in Long Beach, Calif., sinking boats, flooding towns, cutting power and killing dozens of people, according to accounts from The New York Times that year.
Hurricane Hilary moved onshore in the Mexican state of Baja California in 2023, also an El Niño year. While it lost intensity as it moved north into San Diego and Los Angeles, it still brought some flooding. Downtown Los Angeles recorded 2.48 inches of rain over 24 hours, the highest amount ever recorded on a single day in August.
But still.
An exceptionally strong El Niño has made this year an active one for storms in the Pacific. There are three churning in the ocean right now between North America and Hawaii. And since the start of the hurricane season this spring, forecasters had raised the possibility that one of the storms this year would in fact break the mold and head north to Southern California.
As of Wednesday, it was highly unlikely it would be Marie.
Judson Jones contributed reporting.
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