For those of you familiar with Baja, you know that it is hurricane season. Most people I talk to are not aware that hurricanes exist in this region. I find this lightly amusing and certainly indicative of the myopic news lens that that blocks the US from learning about the remainder of the world. I certainly didn’t know about it until we started considering a move.

Our first direct exposure to these weather dynamics was during the build. If you remember, we decided to delay building initially because we were entering the hurricane season. And lucky we did because Lydia would have made our unfinished retaining wall into a swimming pool and certainly done some damage.

It is difficult to believe, but this is our first real hurricane season with the house complete. So far, we’ve had a few squalls, but no tropical storms or hurricanes. For instance, the last time I was down, a decent thunderstorm swept through the valley and dumped a bunch of rain, but nothing like sustained hurricane or tropical storm force winds.

So when we saw this image of then hurricane Lorena, we thought “All right! Here we go!”

What happened next is a great example of thermal dynamics and illustrates a few of the classic variables that affect weather on the peninsula and whether our house gets pummeled by a storm. Full disclaimer, I’m not a meteorologist, but I love weather and I guess could be considered a low-level weather nerd. The following are just observations backed up by patterns and common sense with a bit of science sprinkled in.

While the storm seemed to be going straight for us, the pull of the Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California is strong. Weather systems love warm water. If you are a hurricane at the tip of Baja and trying to decide whether you go right or left, you will most likely go towards the warmer water. This is the first common variable.

The second variable has to do with the land itself. The Sierra del la Laguna is a surprisingly large mountain range jutting straight out of the sea and reaches almost 7k feet at its highest point. This means that storms are blocked by this range when moving from east to west.

Since the warm water sucks the storms into the gulf and the mountains block it on the west side, for us, Lorena ended up as a few sprinkles, light gusts and some pretty clouds. The only detrimental effect we would experience we would have would be grid power outages since our power plant is in La Paz who got a direct hit. With it cloudy, we generate less electricity from the solar, so power conservation during these storms is necessary.

This is Lorena’s status this morning.

This does not mean that storms never hit us from the coast, and as you can see from the above, the next storm approaches. Weather patterns are changing dramatically and a bit unpredictably from climate change, so who knows what will happen in the future. For now, we’ll rely on real meteorologists, data science, the Baja Weather Channel group and Windy to plan and prepare.