While millions are counting the hours to the end of the heat wave, Rachel, with its drenching rain, cooler air and gusty winds, is about to close in on Southern California and the southwestern United States.
Rachel, currently over the eastern Pacific, has a chance of crossing the California state line as a tropical storm, depression or tropical wind and rainstorm later this weekend.
The only official tropical storm landfall in Southern California was in 1939. Multiple storms have come close to making landfall since then with Hilary from 2023 being the most recent.
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Hilary was officially downgraded to what the National Hurricane Center calls a post-tropical cyclone before the center of the storm reached the United States. But, heavy rain continued with the storm, fitting AccuWeather’s classification as a tropical rainstorm since that rain was associated with the tropical storm and significant impacts related to flooding persisted for days.
A similar setup is unfolding across Southern California and the southwestern U.S. this weekend into early next week, provided that a well-defined center and tropical moisture remain intact with Rachel. AccuWeather meteorologists are projecting that Rachel will survive and have a significant impact well inland as a tropical wind and rainstorm.
Rachel was a less intense hurricane than Hilary, which peaked at Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. It is also much less intense than Hurricane Polo, which reached Category 5 intensity three separate times and had maximum winds of 180 miles per hour on two separate occasions.
Despite less initial energy with Rachel, interaction with the jet stream may allow strong wind gusts, with and without thunderstorm activity, to survive well inland over the Southwest, especially near and east and south of the storm center. The AccuWeather Local StormMax™ wind gust for Rachel is 90 mph.
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