After heat streak, temps cool down in the Bay Area
Triple-digit temperatures barreled through the Bay Area this weekend with an unseasonable gusto, tying or breaking records from Santa Rosa to Livermore, leaving just San Francisco and the coast as relatively balmy oases from the heat searing the rest of the region on Sunday.
After Santa Rosa suffered on Saturday through a historically high 102 degrees, besting the previous record of 100 hit back in 1988, and spots in the Tri-Valley seeing highs of 105, Sunday saw Santa Rosa hit 100, falling just short of a 2008 high of 101, while Livermore hit 107, just shy of a 1944 high of 109.
“We do have excessive heat warnings through 9 p.m. Monday evening,” said meteorologist
Rick Canepa with the National Weather Service in Monterey. “We expect dangerously hot temperatures to continue until we see some cooling Tuesday. We saw some cooling along the coast today, and that's a really good sign. We'll have one more day of it, but by Tuesday, things should be cooling off, even inland.”
Canepa called for daytime temperatures in the upper 90s to lower 100s inland, and lows in the 80s in the hills at night, with a marine layer only about 500 feet deep.
On Sunday, Oakland saw a high of 82, San Jose a high of 97 while Concord got a high of 105, none of them a record. San Jose came close to hitting the record of 99, but missed it.
Not surprisingly, San Francisco and the Peninsula stayed cool, with temperatures at San Francisco International Airport hitting 77 at 12:20 p.m., well below 1993's high of 94 degrees.
The high heat, coupled with light winds, smoke from Oregon wildfires and a high-pressure system hanging over the bay, was expected to degrade the air quality significantly on Sunday, said officials from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
It issued its second consecutive Spare the Air advisory for Monday, which means a wood burning ban will be in place and residents are encouraged to carpool, take public transit, limit physical exercise to the early morning hours and leave their cars at home.
“Hot temperatures and tailpipe exhaust from Bay Area traffic is expected to cause unhealthy air quality this weekend,” air district CEO Jack Broadbent said in a statement. “The most effective way to reduce smog is by leaving our cars at home and using transit or carpooling to weekend activities instead.” Spare the Air alerts are issued when ozone pollution, or smog, is projected to reach unhealthy levels. It's particularly harmful to young children, seniors and those with respiratory or heart conditions, air district officials said.
The slightly good news, said Schneider, is that the weekend's heat wave will soon start to taper off as the high-pressure system over the Western United States slowly dissipates.
“On Monday,” she said, “the Bay Area will start to see slightly cooler temperatures, but we'll still have heat advisories and heat warnings all over the region. On Tuesday, though, things should start to cool down into the upper 90s.”
Which is something we never thought we'd be so happy to hear.