San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fog, fireworks not a ‘say can you see’ mix
I had the car radio on while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on the last days of June, listening in wonder to reports from the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. The temperatures were outlandish, unheard of: 108 in Seattle, 116 in Portland, 101 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I was listening to all this as the fog was whipping through the cables of the bridge and the rust red south tower appeared and disappeared in the gray mist, like a mirage. San Francisco was barely visible. I had come from an errand in San Rafael, where it was a warm 70 degrees, stopped in Sausalito, where the wind was howling and the fog was streaming over the hills, and turned on the windshield wipers on the Golden Gate. Summertime, and the living is chilly.
The San Francisco fog is celebrated in song and story. It’s the essence of the “Cool, grey city of love,” in the words of the poet George Sterling. The photographer Fred Lyon thinks the fog adds a bit of mystery to the city, a bit of romance, a sense that anything can happen.
But there are those who hate the fog, from the first mists of late spring to endless gray Fogust.
The warmer parts of the Bay Area — Contra Costa County, central Marin County, the Peninsula — are full of expatriate San Franciscans who fled the city to escape from the fog. There was an old saying about the Sunset and Richmond districts: You could count on two sunny days a year. One was the day you bought the house, the other was the day you sold it.
But these days, when everyone is worrying about the climate, we should be grateful. While everybody else is roasting, we are dressing in layers.
Not only that, but anecdotal evidence suggests that this has been the foggiest summer in quite a while. I’ve been watching the weather myself and noted that there was fog on Twin Peaks, right in the center of the city, for 19 of the 30 June mornings. The TV weather reporters talked about the “June gloom.”
July started with fog, and the National Weather Service promises more of the same for the days ahead — “a prevailing seasonal pattern,” the weather service calls it.
On July 1, the marine layer, the official name for the great fog bank, was 2,200 feet thick. The gray skies, driven by strong winds, penetrated as far inland as Travis Air Force Base, according to weather observers.
The fog, of course, is drawn in by the warm air in the Central Valley. When the summer sun warms the valley, the hot air rises and draws in cool air from the ocean through the gaps in the hills, most notably the Golden Gate strait. “Visitors and recent arrivals in the Bay Region are often puzzled by the sharp changes in summer weather from day to day… The fog seems to come and go in cycles,” the late Harold Gilliam wrote in his classic, “Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region.” Some of the foggy cycles persist for weeks, or maybe a whole season.
I consulted Mike Pechner, a meteorologist who sends out a complete weather and fire threat analysis every day. This year, he says, is much more foggy than years past. “No question about it,” he said.
The change, he says, is particularly noticeable in fog belt locations, but also in places like Oracle Park, where the Giants play. “Maybe you noticed the cold weather in the Bay Bridge Series,” when the Giants and Oakland A’s played on the last weekend in June. It was cold, windy and foggy, “No different than the old night games at Candlestick Park,” Pechner said. “I think this has been the coldest start to the baseball season in 10 years,” he said.
The foggy summer here is not particularly related to climate change, Pechner thinks, but to a change in the wind pattern that causes colder ocean water to rise to the surface. When the air is cold off the coast and warm inland, the fog rolls in. It’s a normal cycle, and we are in the middle of it.
The Northwest heat wave had different origins — a dome of high atmospheric pressure that settled over the region, probably part of climate change.
All that talk about the weather brings us to the Fourth of July, the quintessential summer holiday of hot dogs and beer, parades and picnics in the sun. In San Francisco, the Glorious Fourth has always been an event planner’s nightmare. For years and years, San Francisco has held a big fireworks display starting at dusk on the northern waterfront. The organizers always planned a big show — the rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air and a stupendous dazzling grand finale.
On a good year it was spectacular. On a foggy year, the rockets went up, there was a boom and a dull glow. It was like a discreet office romance. There was a lot of talk, but nobody saw anything.
It looks like fog is on the San Francisco menu this Independence Day. Maybe next year.
“No different than the old night games at Candlestick Park.”
Mike Pechner, meteorologist