Snow once fell on the Los Angeles coastal plain with some regularity – on average, about once per decade. Since official records were first kept in 1877, the downtown Los Angeles weather stationobserved measurable snowfall three times, in 1882, 1932 and 1949, and news reports recorded snowfall elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin in 1913, 1921, 1922, 1926, 1944, 1957, 1962 – and then never again, for 54 years running.

Jan. 15, 1932, what the Times described as “a genuine, old-fashioned Midwest snow flurry” made national headlines and brought a record 2.0 inches of snow to downtown Los Angeles. Albert Einstein, a visiting professor at Caltech, bemoaned the weather, noting to the Times that he and his wife “left Germany for sunshine.” On the frozen streets and sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles, six Angelenos slipped and were hospitalized, including a traffic officer who fell in front of a streetcar (his injuries were not fatal.)




Commenter Wrote:
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> As the arctic is warming faster than the tropics,
> simply because it is so much colder, the jet
> stream slows down. It is this temperature
> difference that drives it. When it slows down it
> meanders farther north and south. This drags
> storms and high/low temperatures to areas not used
> to them, at least in the extremes seen of late.