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Santa Ana Winds (SAWs) are an integral feature of the regional climate of Southern California/Northern Baja California region, but their climate‐scale behavior is poorly understood. In the present work, we identify SAWs in mesoscale dynamical downscaling of a global reanalysis from 1948 to 2012. Model winds are validated with anemometer observations. SAWs exhibit an organized pattern with strongest easterly winds on westward facing downwind slopes and muted magnitudes at sea and over desert lowlands. We construct hourly local and regional SAW indices and analyze elements of their behavior on daily, annual, and multidecadal timescales. SAWs occurrences peak in winter, but some of the strongest winds have occurred in fall. Finally, we observe that SAW intensity is influenced by prominent large‐scale low‐frequency modes of climate variability rooted in the tropical and north Pacific ocean‐atmosphere system.

[1] The Rhines effect is an interaction of Rossby waves and two-dimensional turbulence that induces alternating zonal flows, thereby deforming and eventually destroying coherent vortices that might exist. Large-scale geophysical flows are not strictly two-dimensional. To be applicable to these flows the Rhines effect is therefore generalized. A novel aspect of the generalized Rhines effect is its possible suppression. On Jupiter, it is suppressed in the polar regions and at specific lower latitudes. It is remarkable that exactly there storms (vortices) have been observed, suggesting that storms can exist only where Rossby waves cannot interact with them. Thus the Rhines effect plays not only a role in the formation of the alternating zonal winds on Jupiter, as previously suggested, but in its generalized form also dictates the latitudes at which storms can exist.

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