A Foggy Notion of Looking on the Bright Side

June Gloom?

Don’t kid yourself. Think Summer Bummer.

Scientists from NASA predicted last week that our annual coastal shroud will outlast June by a long shot. Poring over satellite photos and charts of ocean temperatures, they ventured that the Gloom might stay the entire season, clinging to our psyches like a giant gray Post-It.

Certain people inevitably will take this as bad news. Tourism officials are not likely to build ad campaigns around the theme “Come to Ventura County--Where the Sun Don’t Shine.” Beach types who enjoy their life-threatening doses of solar radiation all day every day will resent putting on their Ray-Bans and Speedos for a lazy afternoon of fog-bathing.

What they don’t realize is that the gray mornings of the June Gloom are fabulous for jogging, for puttering in the garden, for sipping coffee in the backyard. After 30 or 40 such mornings, people also find them great for sitting in a cold tub and wondering just how long we have before the universe whooshes back to the size of a poppy seed.

June Gloom has had terrible press, and this affects our views of it. Presentation is everything; Ojai has cleverly elevated the sunset--what could be more mundane than a sunset?--to “The Pink Moment.” So how much could a decent public relations firm charge to repackage June Gloom and market it as “The Time of the Pearl”?

And where’s Raymond Chandler when we need him? The grandfather of the hard-boiled detective novel immortalized the Santa Anas--that other quintessentially Californian weather annoyance--in a story called “Red Wind.”

“On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight,” Chandler wrote. “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

What if we tweak Chandler’s famous description to reflect the roiling passions so often triggered in the Time of the Pearl?

“On days like that every coffee break ends with someone muttering that it’s time to get back to work. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks, and say to themselves, ‘Oh, why bother?’ Anything can happen, but nothing much will.”

There. Feel better?

Gary Ryan, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard, knows his June Glooms from his Catalina Eddies and he thinks NASA’s forecast is right on the money.

“I think there’s a great deal of validity in it,” he said. “But it’s not cut and dried. It doesn’t mean that the marine layer will be extensive every single day, all summer long. We’re going to have breaks.”

Most afternoons, the fog will burn off, he said. Some mornings will be clear as a fine chablis.

Besides, he said, June Gloom, while nicely rhyming, is a misnomer in the first place.

“If you look at the figures really closely, it’s not scientifically accurate,” he said. “The months with the most fog and haze are August and September.”

Yes, he conceded, June has not done well in the sunshine department. Over the last 30 years, it has averaged just 10 clear days--fewer than any other month. But only nine days on average have been deemed “cloudy”; the rest are, in the memorable phrase of TV weathermen everywhere, “partly cloudy.”

(By the way, “clear day” is not a designation the Weather Service bestows just because it’s feeling lovely at the time. “Clear” is defined as “one-tenth to three-tenths sky cover, sunset to sunrise,” Ryan explained.)

In any event, he continued, we’ll probably get some sun and more clouds than usual all summer long. Whether it will rival the summer of ’81 for sheer dejectedness, he couldn’t say.

“It was the gloomiest summer I could find,” he said, with a hint of a chill. “In June, there were 23 days you could classify as gloomy. In July we had 29 days of gloom. In August, every day except one started out cloudy, with haze.”

Predictably, the problem is being laid at the feet of the El Nino family. El Nino’s kid sister, La Nina, has chilled a vast tract of the Pacific off North America. When warm summer air hits the icy water, clouds form and head for the closest picnic.

Still, there’s hope. The Time of the Pearl is coming, and we can prepare for it. It may be gray outside, but it needn’t be gray within. We don’t have to be depressed if we don’t want to be. Any disaster store will be all too glad to sell the Time of the Pearl Survival Kit--a box of good cheer consisting of Laurel and Hardy videos, Snickers bars and a set of Billy Bob teeth for everyone in the family.

Bring on the fog. Bring on the millennium.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.