All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
July 22, 2014 - Skeptoid
16:45
Skeptoid #424: The Santa Barbara Simoom of 1859

Stories of a lethally hot storm wind in Santa Barbara in 1859 persist to this day. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The 1859 Santa Barbara Heatwave 00:07:22
As the Earth warms and we tend to set new temperature records with increasing regularity, the lists of hottest days ever often include one anomalistic entry, a day in 1859 when, in Santa Barbara, California, a freakish hot wind ripped down from the canyons and wrought destruction with temperatures as high as 133 degrees Fahrenheit.
Today we're going to look at the evidence for this apocryphal catastrophe and see how much scrutiny it can stand.
The Santa Barbara Samoom is up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's HyperFixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Santa Barbara Samoom of 1859.
Today we're going to go back more than a century and a half to a hot summer day on the central coast of California to the town of Santa Barbara.
June 17th, 1859 began as a summer day much like any other.
Clear with plenty of warm sunshine, plus a cool breeze to make it just perfect.
But according to legend, something happened that wrought sudden death and destruction.
From out of nowhere, a wind with temperatures usually reserved for baking ovens blasted down from the hills, killing animals and injuring people.
It immediately set the country's highest recorded temperature.
They named it the Samoom after the hot Sahara wind of the same name.
But it turns out that data is hard to come by.
Was the Santa Barbara Samoom a true freak of nature, or perhaps merely a tall tale told to visitors?
Here's a snippet from the 1859 Samoom from The Insider's Guide to Santa Barbara.
Until 1934, Santa Barbara had a record high temperature on the United States Weather Bureau's books.
On June 17th, 1859, a Samoom, scorching wind, swept down from the northwest and the mercury soared to 133 degrees Fahrenheit, about 56 degrees Celsius.
Cattle dropped dead and birds fell from the sky.
The record was topped when the mercury hit 134 Fahrenheit, about 57 Celsius, in Death Valley in 1934.
It sounds a bit like a tall tale, a perfect subject for our skeptical eye.
Sudden hot winds are absolutely a reality on the California coasts.
They're called the Santa Ana winds and are the main contributor to the wildfires that can so often be destructive to coastal communities.
Dry air from the Mojave Desert and even the Great Basin further inland forms a high-pressure region which cools, sending it spilling downhill toward the coast.
The wind is very dry and gusts can reach hurricane forces at their strongest.
The wind is usually hot, but not because it came from the desert.
It gets heated on the way by adiabatic forces, basically compression.
Santa Ana winds can happen at any time of the year, but are most common in late autumn and early winter.
Now although Santa Barbara is a ways up the coast from the Santa winds, it is indirectly affected by them.
The high-pressure systems that create the Santa Ana winds are usually moving east, so a few days before they collapse into Santa Ana's, they often cause a similar phenomenon in Santa Barbara that locals call the sundowner.
When the sundowner winds spill over the Santa Ynez Mountains and rush to the sea, they can wreak some havoc, but because their path is much shorter, adiabatic compression forces don't have as much opportunity to heat the sundowners as much as their more southerly cousins.
As for the term simoom, it's the Arabic word for a sudden hot wind filled with sand.
Searching old newspapers from the 19th century in the United States, I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that the word simoom was often used in the press in reference to gusty winds.
So it's not surprising that the original recounters of this particular story called it a simoom.
Most of the sources for this tale cite a 1966 book, Goleta the Good Land, where author Walter Tompkins told it with a fair bit of dramatic bravado.
But his only known source was a much older book, 100 years older.
It was a coastal survey published in 1869, 10 years after the alleged event, by the United States Coast Survey called Coast Pilot, California, Oregon, and Washington Territory.
Author George Davidson was an assistant surveyor on that trip and later became the University of California's first professor of geography.
Here is the entirety of Davidson's account, and so far as anyone knows, this does indeed represent the earliest and most complete account of the incident.
The only instance of the Samoom on this coast mentioned either in its history or traditions was that occurring at Santa Barbara on Friday, the 17th of June, 1859.
The temperature during the morning was between 75 and 80 and gradually and regularly increased until about 1 o'clock p.m. when a blast of hot air from the northwest swept suddenly over the town and struck the inhabitants with terror.
It was quickly followed by others.
At 2 o'clock, the thermometer exposed to the air rose to 133 degrees and continued at or near that point for nearly three hours whilst the burning wind raised dense clouds of impalpable dust.
No human being could withstand the heat.
All betook themselves to their dwelling and carefully closed every door and window.
The thick adobe walls would have required days to have become warmed and were consequently an admirable protection.
Calves, rabbits, birds, etc. were killed.
The trees were blighted.
Fruit was blasted and fell to the ground, burned only on one side, and gardens were ruined.
At five o'clock, the thermometer fell to 122 degrees, and at 7 it stood at 77 degrees.
A fisherman in the channel in an open boat came back with his arms badly blistered.
Tompkins' 1966 account added minor details, like people taking refuge behind walls and buildings and animals jumping into wells for refuge and drowning, to the point that clearing out the wells afterward was problematic.
Debunking the Extreme Temperature Myth 00:07:51
But since Tompkins gave no other source and the accounts were similar on the major points, it's probable that his minor additions were attributable only to dramatic license.
Thompson did make the assumption that Davidson's survey recorded the 133 degrees from their boat at sea, a note that is probably wrong.
Davidson related the story of the Samoom as the only recorded such case in California, but made no suggestion that either he or the members of his survey were present when it happened.
Indeed, Davidson went on to say in his next paragraph that he and his party frequently experienced similar but much cooler blasts of wind while making astronomical observations ashore in 1850.
So in all likelihood, Davidson was relating a local story, not giving a personal account.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
In 2010, Bill Norrington at the University of California Santa Barbara Department of Geography asked Professor Joel Michelson what he thought about Tompkins' version of the story.
He answered, I've never found any outside sources to validate Tompkins' story, and I'm highly skeptical of its veracity.
I don't doubt that strong, hot, dry, downslope winds could kick up lots of dust and produce very high temperatures, but in the 110 to 115 degree range at most, the 133 degrees just isn't physically reasonable, as it would require the creation of extremely hot air mass somewhere to the northeast.
Last Monday's weather was a very good, strong example of the sort of conditions that would produce such a heat wave, and our temperatures topped out at least 20 degrees below Thompson's figure.
Stronger winds could have increased the heating a bit, but not nearly that much.
Add to all that meteorologically based skepticism Tompkins' well-known tendency to mix liberal doses of fiction into his histories, and I think you have a strong case for discounting this one.
As stated earlier, modern retellings often claim that this 133 Fahrenheit was considered an official record.
Not so.
The historical high for Santa Barbara on June 17th is 36 degrees Celsius or 96 Fahrenheit, which was recorded in 1957, a record that stands today.
The Samoom's 133 does not, in fact, have any authority as an actual measurement.
Nor should it, according to meteorologist Christopher C. Burt writing for Weather Underground.
In 2010, he compiled a list of various claims for the highest recorded temperature ever on Earth and assigned each one a validity score of 0 to 10.
He gave the 1859 Samoom story a 1 out of 10, saying, There's no record of who made this measurement or exactly where it was made in Santa Barbara.
Some later sources say it was made on a U.S. coastal geosurvey vessel.
If that is the case, then the temperature is not possible, since the waters off Santa Barbara in June are never warmer than about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and any wind blowing over the ocean would have its temperature modified by the cool water, no matter how hot the air.
The most important point being that there's no record of that 133 measurement ever actually having been made, just like the other claims on Burt's list.
They include the 58C 136 Fahrenheit said to have been measured in Libya in 1922, to which he also gave a 1 out of 10, citing overwhelming evidence against its reliability.
The current official record holder, 57C 134 Fahrenheit, at Death Valley, California in 1913, gets a 5 out of 10 from BERT.
Evidence shows that it was probably an error, but there's no way to know.
BERT's only 10 out of 10, a truly proven measurement, was 54C 129F, also at Death Valley, on multiple occasions, and probably should be the official highest temperature.
One of the things that struck me about the details was the fisherman with his blistered arms.
Being in very dry air at 56C133F, humidity is as low as 10% in sundowner winds, does not blister skin.
However, sunburn from being in an open boat for half a day or more can very easily blister your skin, regardless of the temperature.
Cattle and rabbits survive temperature in the 50 plus C 120 plus F range all the time.
Birds don't suddenly die and fall out of the air.
The only plausible things in the account is that thick adobe walls do indeed provide a nice cool environment on hot days, and that fruit that falls from a tree and lands on a frying hot surface will indeed appear to be scorched on one side only.
No shocking, extraordinary stories necessary.
Most likely what happened was an extraordinarily hot and powerful sundowner wind, perhaps one strong enough that people talked about it for a few years.
We know for a fact that they do happen, and we know for a fact that they are sometimes unusually hot and strong.
The hottest sundowner ever was 43C 109F in 1990, and sundowners frequently reach hurricane force.
We have every reason to conclude that whatever event prompted the tall tale of the 1859 Samoa was probably in this range.
Over the past century and a half, no researcher has ever uncovered evidence of the event that anyone thought was exceptional enough to publish until the Coast Survey 10 years later.
We have meteorological precedent and suspicious lack of documentary evidence to support a strong sundowner as the probable explanation for the stunning 1859 Samoom.
Why It Wasn't That Hot 00:01:29
Every Skeptoid episode has complete bibliographic references on its transcript page at skeptoid.com.
Plus further reading suggestions if you want to know more.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection