A Day of Weather Wonders--This Is Springtime?

An unusually cold and powerful May storm started edging out of the Southland on Wednesday after apparently spawning a couple of small tornadoes and dumping heavy rain in the valleys and up to 2 feet of snow in the mountains.

Brief but intense thundershowers were reported in foothill communities throughout the day, and officials said gusty winds and limited visibility may have contributed to the crash of a light plane near Gorman that killed the pilot.

One of the tornadoes--if that’s what they were--ripped the roof off an auto repair shop in Long Beach. The other skipped through Ventura County, barely touching down and doing no significant damage.

The rare snow prompted a rare move: the mid-May reopening of two Southern California ski resorts that already had closed for the season.

Precipitation totals increased to near-record levels Wednesday as Los Angeles approached the final month of an El Nino-augmented rainfall season that sometimes seems as though it will never end.

The National Weather Service said 0.84 of an inch of rain fell at the Los Angeles Civic Center between 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. Wednesday, raising the total for the season--which runs from July 1 through June 30--to 30.96 inches.

That’s well more than twice the normal season’s total for the date--14.69 inches--and the most rain that has fallen on Los Angeles since the 31.28 inches recorded during the last El Nino season, in 1982-83.

Statistics from WeatherData Inc., which provides weather forecasts for The Times, show that rainfall totals in Woodland Hills so far this month makes it the wettest May since at least 1950.

The previous record, set in 1977, was 3.37 inches. The second-highest total was 1.57 inches recorded in 1956. Average rainfall for May, as measured by a weather station in Woodland Hills, is only .18 inches.

Statewide, a total of 74,506 victims of this year’s largely El Nino-related storms have applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, the agency said Wednesday. More than half--41,541--are from Los Angeles County, FEMA said.

The current storm generated some furious winds as it began to head east into Arizona on Wednesday.

Strong gusts were reported in the Gorman area, where the pilot of a white “Cessna-like” aircraft died when his plane crashed into a rugged ridge near Quail Lake about three miles north of California 138, Los Angeles County Fire Department officials said.

The name of the pilot, identified only as a white man, was not made public pending notification of his family. It was not know where the flight originated or where he was headed.

The plane’s registration number belonged to a 1972 Bellanca, said Wayne Pollack, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.

Witnesses said that what appeared to be a tornado destroyed the roof of a repair shop at a Ford dealership in Long Beach shortly after 5 a.m., but no one was injured.

Fernando Flores said he was at work, cleaning up the dealership’s main building, when violent winds began to blow and he “heard a loud noise.” Flores said he stepped outside in the pouring rain to see that the roof of the repair shop behind the main building had disintegrated.

Firefighters tried to cover the damaged structure with tarpaulins, but the winds were too strong, according to Long Beach Fire Capt. Keith Seward.

The weather service said officials at Point Mugu in Ventura County reported seeing a funnel cloud about 10 a.m. “that touched down briefly” in open fields near Camarillo, causing no damage.

“We could see this one from the office roof,” a weather service meteorologist in Oxnard said. “Phew!”

Air traffic controllers at March Air Force Base near Riverside said they saw a funnel cloud moving through the area but it did not appear to have reached the ground.

Whether the cyclonic winds reported in Long Beach and Ventura County actually were from tornadoes has yet to be verified. However, in both cases, witnesses described a spinning funnel reaching from the base of the clouds to the ground, and that, in meteorological terms, constitutes a tornado.

Tornadoes scatter debris in circular patterns, meteorologists said, and a study of the damage patterns should determine in the next several days whether tornadoes actually struck.

Although reports of tornadoes here seem to have increased in recent years, that’s probably because of better reporting and more thorough investigation, said Gary Ryan, a weather service meteorologist.

Ryan said twisters in Southern California really aren’t that uncommon, but most of them are “baby tornadoes” compared with their much bigger, much more powerful brethren in the Midwest. He said Midwestern cyclones frequently are deadly, while no one is known to have been killed by one here.

Snow fell off and on throughout the day in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains, with 2 feet and more at resort levels by midafternoon.

The Snow Valley resort in Running Springs and New Mountain High in Wrightwood said they were reopening and would remain open at least through Sunday.

Lighter snow from the northern edge of the storm fell in the High Sierra, with about 6 inches reported at Truckee and about 4 inches at Incline Village.

Between 5 p.m. Tuesday and 5 p.m. Wednesday, Woodland Hills received 1.13 inches of rain. Northridge received 1.14 inches, Glendale had 1.02 inches, Van Nuys topped out at .98 of an inch, Burbank had .94 of an inch, Chatsworth recorded .90 of an inch and Newhall received .77 of an inch. Palmdale scraped by with the least rainfall, receiving only .13 of an inch, according to figures from the National Weather Service.

The storm is expected to be gone by this morning, with partly cloudy skies today and hazy sunshine Friday.

“By Saturday, though, we could be dealing with another one,” said John Sherwin, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc.

“There’s a storm out there over the Pacific, not as powerful as the current one,” he said. “But it could drop a few showers on Saturday and Sunday.”

Correspondents Patrick Kerkstra in Long Beach, Nick Green in Ventura County and Darrell Satzman in the San Fernando Valley and Times staff writer Claire Vitucci contributed to this story.