Why Has California Been So Cloudy Lately?

“June Gloom” has long been part of the California lexicon, an almost-rhyming reminder that a few weeks of overcast skies typically precede a sunny, scalding summer.

But perhaps you, like me, feel the gloom has gone a little overboard this year.

Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, was dreary across most of the Golden State. Since then, I’ve heard of many beach trips canceled and sports games rescheduled because of surprisingly uncooperative weather. A friend who is getting married in Los Angeles this weekend has sent out an “in case of rain” memo.

So, yes, though June Gloom — and “May Gray,” and even “No-Sky July” — are familiar along the California coast, this year has been “unusually cool and cloudy,” Miguel Miller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego, told me. There’s often a thick layer of low clouds and fog in late spring and early summer, he said, but “this year it’s on steroids.”

In San Diego, a city synonymous with sunshine, there hasn’t been one completely sunny day since Feb. 15, Miller said. And across much of Southern California, there have been nearly double the normal number of cloudy days lately.

In a typical May, the San Diego International Airport will log 11 cloudy days, defined as days with at least 75 percent cloud cover. This year there were 20. The story was similar at the Los Angeles International Airport weather monitoring site: 18 cloudy days logged last month, compared with the usual 10.

The pattern in June has been the same, if not worse: Nine of the first 12 days of the month were cloud-filled in San Diego, and eight at LAX — as many as we usually see in the whole month, Miller said.

The trouble comes from a series of low-pressure systems that have been stalling over California, bringing cloudier and cooler conditions with them, experts say. Now and then, one of the systems will let up, allowing clearer skies and warmer temperatures, but then another quickly sets in.

The dreary weather pattern is particularly noticeable in Southern California, but these low-pressure systems have been keeping temperatures down in much of the West. In Sacramento, the high on Memorial Day was 75 degrees, well below the average of 84 degrees, according to Chelsea Peters, a Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento.

“We’ve been in this pattern for a while, and I’m not complaining,” Peters said. “It’s normally, by this time, in the 90s, if not in the triple digits, so I’m perfectly happy with these low 80s.”

This cooler-than-normal start to summer isn’t related to our very wet winter, experts told me. But the June Gloom has been a little harder for some Californians to bear coming so soon after all that rain.

Brigid McMahon, who lives in Huntington Beach, emailed me this week to say that she felt as though she hadn’t woken up to sunshine in at least six months.

“On a good day, the sun might be out for a few hours,” McMahon wrote. “It’s very depressing. The weather is the reason we put up with the high costs and horrible traffic, right?”

The Weather Service doesn’t make long-range predictions about cloudiness. But the agency does expect below-average temperatures to continue in California for the rest of June.

The outlook for July through September is the opposite: Above-normal temperatures are expected throughout the state.

“Hopefully, by the end of June and early July, you’ll be seeing a lot more sun across Southern California,” said Richard Thompson, a meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Oxnard. “It’ll get here eventually.”

For more:

Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Scott Hartman, who lives in San Jose. Scott recommends two places to enjoy redwood forests in the northern half of the state:

My two favorite state parks are Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Henry Cowell is close to Santa Cruz, where I play in the symphony and love to hike in the hills. It has a 45-minute, very easy trail that has some giant old-growth trees. There are trees up to 1,800 years old, and the tallest is 285 feet tall. It’s five minutes off the freeway but feels isolated and quiet.

Every summer I teach at Cal Poly Humboldt, and even though it’s a six-hour drive for me, I drive the entire 30-mile length of the Avenue of the Giants both when I head up there and on the way home. I always have a car with a sunroof just so that I can drive the avenue with all my windows and the roof open.

Redwood forests are like no other place on earth. As soon as I smell the air, my blood pressure lowers and I can’t stop smiling. The feeling of standing at the base of one of the Giants is like standing before an impressive mountain; the feeling of smallness is overwhelming and restorative.

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

Tell us

We’re almost halfway through 2023! What are the best things that have happened to you so far this year? What have been your wins? Or your unexpected joys, big or small?

Tell me at CAToday@nytimes.com. Please include your full name and the city where you live.

And before you go, some good news

California, a state plagued by droughts, has a strange relationship with water. That’s inspiring people to try “water walks,” which involve tracing a river or waterway “from sea to source” to better understand how the water supply works, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Water walks can take weeks to complete. “For many, it’s about learning where our water comes from and bearing witness to what’s happening with it,” said Kate Bunney, co-founder of the Sonoma County nonprofit Walking Water. As she put it, the trips are about “how we restore our relationships to water.”

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Tuesday. Enjoy your weekend. — Soumya

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword.

Briana Scalia and Johnna Margalotti contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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