Take a look at our ikitesurf.com sensors below of Los Barriles and La Ventana. There is a shocking difference. That day our major wind machines, the North Pacific High and the 4-Corners region were weak and distant and did not contribute to our wind.
When that happens, most of our wind is produced by heating in the Los Planes Valley, producing mild thermal winds for La Ventana. Meanwhile, the “Santiago Valley” produces weaker winds for Los Barriles. Since the Los Planes Valley is a dead-end valley its low-pressure is stronger hence La Ventana usually has stronger thermal winds when there are no large-scale El Norte winds.
Often a low-pressure area south of Cabo helps those winds if positioned to increase the oveall pressure gradient down the Sea of Cortez.
So what happened yesterday:
1- First note the low to mid-teens winds at La Ventana.
2- Then note the upper-teens to mid 20’s winds for Los Barriles
3- Look at our La Ventana wind graph. Notice how the winds look like a typical thermal wind pattern with a sudden ramp, then plateauing and finally fading as the valley cooled.
4- Look how different the Los Barriles windgraph looks. The graph starts like a typical low to mid-teens thermal wind. But it never plateaus or fades and actually climbs into the mid 20’s! So something else must have been contributing to jazzing up the thermal winds.
5- That something else was the low-pressure south of Cabo. Looking at the pressures recorded by our Tempest weather stations in the Los Cabos area it is clear that the low-pressure moved closer to Los Barriles. These readings confirm what the modeled isobars suggest in the map below.
At present, I have no way of forecasting these atypical Los Barriles winds at 8 AM, but in the future, when I see the low-pressure in this position, I will suggest stronger Los Barriles winds.