Hurricane Polo unlikely to bring rain, but high surf expected Play

Hurricane Polo probably is not going to bring rain to Southern California, but it will bring us some high surf starting Sunday. A strong jet stream looks like it's going to blow the hurricane to the east of us into Arizona and New Mexico.

Nearly all of the computer models right now show that the storm will not come up far enough north to be a big rainmaker for Southern California.

That said, Daniel Swain, the professor of meteorology at the University of California, says he has never seen a hurricane get so big so fast.

Swain said: "The remnant moisture is not looking too impressive this time around, but the waves could be a problem. So this does look like it's more likely to be an issue along central and southern Baja California, and then possibly from a flood risk perspective inland across the southwestern U.S., but mostly east of California.

"But there's a slight chance that if it did take one of these outermost northwestern trajectories, it could still affect San Diego with some moisture and winds," he said.

There are a couple of gigantic unknowns in how this hurricane will behave. First, the giant blob of very warm water between California and Baja California. And secondly, there's a hurricane blowing around halfway to Hawaii, and it may bump into and combine with Hurricane Polo.

When hurricanes collide, there's something called the Fujiwhara effect. They start to spin around each other in very unpredictable ways.

Swain said: "What we end up having, the Fujiwhara effect, ultimately essentially means they start to orbit around a common center. So now you have these systems that are spinning in their own right, but now they're orbiting around a common center."

That makes the next five days' worth of hurricane activity off the coast of Baja very interesting. And by interesting, we mean hard to predict.