Winds are usually named after where they blow from, but not in the case of L.A.s' fire-driving Santa Ana winds. Hence, my proposal for more informative names.
Yeah, I also thought it had something to do with Satan:
from Wikipedia:
"Supposedly, in their telling, the term Santa Ana wind derived from a Native American phrase for "big wind" or "devil wind" that was then altered by Californios into the form "Satanás" (meaning Satan), and then still later corrupted into "Santa Ana." However, an authority on local Native American languages claims this supposed Indigenous term, "Santana" or "sandana," never existed..."
I'd read this once in an old book about Cali, that it had to do with Satan, praise him.
Santa Ana city fathers (who were almost all real estate developers) tried for generations to disconnect their municipality from the destructive wind in the popular mind. I sympathize because the term Santa Ana wind is misleading about where the wind is usually coming from.
A nice thing about my proposed term "Death Valley wind" is that there are no real estate developers in Death Valley to complain.
I'm 75 and as a kid I always heard them referred to as "Santanas." Left California about 50 years ago so I don't know when "Santa Ana" came to predominate.
These winds also occur on the coast of BC during what we call “Arctic outbreaks.” This happens when a mass of icy cold Arctic air comes south. These are dry cold high pressure systems. The wind blows from inland through the coastal mountain valleys, bringing cold clear weather to the coast.
From what I’ve read, the Santa Ana winds are the same: high pressure ridge inland with the wind rushing out through the valleys.
Growing up the Inland Empire, I was taught (probably on the playground) that they were called that because they came from the Santa Ana mountain range.
That was my assumption. And, indeed, sometimes they do come from the southeast. But the worst ones tend to come from the north.
And because most of the various mountain ranges in the Los Angeles are run east-west (although not the Santa Anas, which I believe run from northwest to southeast), it's real important to have a sense of whether you are north or south of a fire.
"Here come those Death Valley winds again" just doesn't scan as well as "here come those Santa Ana winds again." Since I don't actually live there, I prefer the aesthetic to the accurate, but I do understand Mr. Sailer's concern.
Winds like these occur in many places throughout the world. The official name for them are Fehn winds, which blow downslope from higher to lower elevations. As winds blow downslope to lower elevations, the air warms and dries out.
In Southern California, they are called Santa Ana winds because they blow down the Santa Ana River canyon. The name stuck and it is used for downslope winds anywhere in Southern California.
In Northern California, they are called Diablo winds because they blow off of Mount Diablo.
In Colorado, they are called Chinook winds and, typically, can occur during the Summer months.
That's what I was thinking about too. It's somewhat common with local names associated to it (It is "Föhn" or "Foehn" btw...I know...Germans.).
Didn't know that Colorado has Chinook winds too. I only knew the one in the Cascades. That's where the Chinooks lived after all. I looked after it and apparently they both have (and both are foehn type winds) but say it differently. Weird how that works.
Never have lived or even visited California so in my mind the Raymond Chandler quip is forefront on the topic. But Mexican Santa Anna caused a lot of trouble during the time of populating of Southern California, so perhaps a bad wind got associated. Like malaria means bad air.
West Virginia is a very windy state. I propose that we name our west-east winds the Robert Byrd Winds. Half of the new federal buildings and highways are named after Byrd so why not name a wind after him?
David Foster Wallace Wrote a brilliant essay about David Lynch in "Premiere" magazine, in 1995/6, during the filming of "Lost Highway" -- I recently re-read it, for obvious reasons. Wallace, being a Midwesterner and a self-confessed hick, did some major describing of how weird Los Angeles is/was. (This quote will be very long; hard to excerpt)
"These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel....
Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment, with perfusive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there's a warning out that day for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards (24) and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA's murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it's easy to confirm that something's up atmospherically: sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there's a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West- Coast equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms."
For completeness, this is footnote #24 referenced above, which being already the 24th footnote halfway through a MAGAZINE ARTICLE, and also one continuous sentence that somehow makes sense, is a very Wallace thing indeed:
"LAFD inspectors were all over the set, glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nicotinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scott Cameron decreed that people could smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was apparently only one, and David Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit All-Natural cigarettes, tended to commandeer the butt can, and people who wanted to smoke and were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn his back so they could steal the can."
I'm an equality guy. A UBI guy. I believe that the love of money is the root of most evil and that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" (while by now a metaphor for a few things) was likely, at an early date, referring to agriculture —something women dragged men into because they wanted to feather their nests for the sake of their children by being able to store food/wealth.... so I have no love for capitalism or the very different "value" it assigns to different human beings.
I support mankind vomiting out that system of greed and inhumanity.
Affirmative Action exists because of this horrible system that fosters such inequality.
However, as a man of the moment who prefers playing tug of war within that system you have of course been right all along that DEI should be respelled DIE by members of your team, and if I were you I would pit all my effort at this post-crash moment into trying to win that nomenclature game so that you get the credit for the inevitable understanding in that direction.
"DIE in the Sky" is a great headline.
Again, I do not support your ideology or the very concept of competing capitalism teams. There is death in it, as the Bible accurately told us At The Very Beginning.
But as a friend, if it turns out that the crash was due to a woman hired above her skill level for DEI reasons, you may as well may hay of it with your acronym. Despite your lack of luck in generating too many such renamings, I would imagine that the herd is currently well primed to understand and accept the nomenclature you've been pushing for a while and you deserve the credit for it.
Wikipedia has a discussion of the name. It looks at some alternate ideas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds
Includes references: here’s one:
— can’t seem to enter the URL. But it’s at the Wikipedia link.
Yeah, I also thought it had something to do with Satan:
from Wikipedia:
"Supposedly, in their telling, the term Santa Ana wind derived from a Native American phrase for "big wind" or "devil wind" that was then altered by Californios into the form "Satanás" (meaning Satan), and then still later corrupted into "Santa Ana." However, an authority on local Native American languages claims this supposed Indigenous term, "Santana" or "sandana," never existed..."
I'd read this once in an old book about Cali, that it had to do with Satan, praise him.
Santa Ana city fathers (who were almost all real estate developers) tried for generations to disconnect their municipality from the destructive wind in the popular mind. I sympathize because the term Santa Ana wind is misleading about where the wind is usually coming from.
A nice thing about my proposed term "Death Valley wind" is that there are no real estate developers in Death Valley to complain.
I'm 75 and as a kid I always heard them referred to as "Santanas." Left California about 50 years ago so I don't know when "Santa Ana" came to predominate.
My mother pronounced it “Santana.” But in Spanish, “Santa Ana” is pronounced “Santana.”
These winds also occur on the coast of BC during what we call “Arctic outbreaks.” This happens when a mass of icy cold Arctic air comes south. These are dry cold high pressure systems. The wind blows from inland through the coastal mountain valleys, bringing cold clear weather to the coast.
From what I’ve read, the Santa Ana winds are the same: high pressure ridge inland with the wind rushing out through the valleys.
Yes! Can’t disparage the good name of Santa Ana, very underrated city.
Growing up the Inland Empire, I was taught (probably on the playground) that they were called that because they came from the Santa Ana mountain range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_Mountains
That was my assumption. And, indeed, sometimes they do come from the southeast. But the worst ones tend to come from the north.
And because most of the various mountain ranges in the Los Angeles are run east-west (although not the Santa Anas, which I believe run from northwest to southeast), it's real important to have a sense of whether you are north or south of a fire.
Well, if no SA Winds, then Steely Dan would have to change the lyrics to "Babylon Sisters." And that would be very bad.
Randy Newman call the Santa Anas a north wind. He's probably more precise about Los Angeles facts than most songwriters.
"Here come those Death Valley winds again" just doesn't scan as well as "here come those Santa Ana winds again." Since I don't actually live there, I prefer the aesthetic to the accurate, but I do understand Mr. Sailer's concern.
Winds like these occur in many places throughout the world. The official name for them are Fehn winds, which blow downslope from higher to lower elevations. As winds blow downslope to lower elevations, the air warms and dries out.
In Southern California, they are called Santa Ana winds because they blow down the Santa Ana River canyon. The name stuck and it is used for downslope winds anywhere in Southern California.
In Northern California, they are called Diablo winds because they blow off of Mount Diablo.
In Colorado, they are called Chinook winds and, typically, can occur during the Summer months.
That's what I was thinking about too. It's somewhat common with local names associated to it (It is "Föhn" or "Foehn" btw...I know...Germans.).
Didn't know that Colorado has Chinook winds too. I only knew the one in the Cascades. That's where the Chinooks lived after all. I looked after it and apparently they both have (and both are foehn type winds) but say it differently. Weird how that works.
Never have lived or even visited California so in my mind the Raymond Chandler quip is forefront on the topic. But Mexican Santa Anna caused a lot of trouble during the time of populating of Southern California, so perhaps a bad wind got associated. Like malaria means bad air.
West Virginia is a very windy state. I propose that we name our west-east winds the Robert Byrd Winds. Half of the new federal buildings and highways are named after Byrd so why not name a wind after him?
Drop the "Valley' and just call it Death Winds.
David Foster Wallace Wrote a brilliant essay about David Lynch in "Premiere" magazine, in 1995/6, during the filming of "Lost Highway" -- I recently re-read it, for obvious reasons. Wallace, being a Midwesterner and a self-confessed hick, did some major describing of how weird Los Angeles is/was. (This quote will be very long; hard to excerpt)
"These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel....
Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment, with perfusive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there's a warning out that day for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards (24) and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA's murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it's easy to confirm that something's up atmospherically: sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there's a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West- Coast equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms."
-- from "David Lynch Keeps his Head"
For completeness, this is footnote #24 referenced above, which being already the 24th footnote halfway through a MAGAZINE ARTICLE, and also one continuous sentence that somehow makes sense, is a very Wallace thing indeed:
"LAFD inspectors were all over the set, glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nicotinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scott Cameron decreed that people could smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was apparently only one, and David Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit All-Natural cigarettes, tended to commandeer the butt can, and people who wanted to smoke and were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn his back so they could steal the can."
Steve, may I give you some advice?
I'm an equality guy. A UBI guy. I believe that the love of money is the root of most evil and that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" (while by now a metaphor for a few things) was likely, at an early date, referring to agriculture —something women dragged men into because they wanted to feather their nests for the sake of their children by being able to store food/wealth.... so I have no love for capitalism or the very different "value" it assigns to different human beings.
https://youtube.com/shorts/CNCtrBv_8jo?feature=share
I support mankind vomiting out that system of greed and inhumanity.
Affirmative Action exists because of this horrible system that fosters such inequality.
However, as a man of the moment who prefers playing tug of war within that system you have of course been right all along that DEI should be respelled DIE by members of your team, and if I were you I would pit all my effort at this post-crash moment into trying to win that nomenclature game so that you get the credit for the inevitable understanding in that direction.
"DIE in the Sky" is a great headline.
Again, I do not support your ideology or the very concept of competing capitalism teams. There is death in it, as the Bible accurately told us At The Very Beginning.
But as a friend, if it turns out that the crash was due to a woman hired above her skill level for DEI reasons, you may as well may hay of it with your acronym. Despite your lack of luck in generating too many such renamings, I would imagine that the herd is currently well primed to understand and accept the nomenclature you've been pushing for a while and you deserve the credit for it.