What sucks in Garbage City today? Pride partygoers destroyed cars and tagged up SOMA. The SFPD isn’t trying to close open-air drug markets the right way. Home prices have fallen dramatically in Lower Pac Heights, to the point where the median price is now only $1.25 million! It’s just your usual Tuesday cataclysm, and meanwhile we’re all ignoring the truly biggest story, the one that unites all San Franciscans, from the most abject fentanyl addict to the loftiest monocle on Nob Hill:
The weather fucking sucks ass.
I used to maintain a daily weather Twitter account (still there, for now, despite EM’s pledge to erase inactive accounts) so I thought about the weather in San Francisco quite a bit and now I’ve lived here for 30+ years and so I can confidently report that it’s not just you, the weather fucking sucks ass.
My kid is in an outdoor camp right now in San Francisco. In some places maybe I’d be worried about her getting sunburned or getting heatstroke or not being hydrated. It was 56 degrees this morning when I dropped her off. I’m worried about her getting hypothermia.
I’ve been here a long time and I know about June Gloom and all that and every summer I say the same thing: it’s too fucking cold. However, this year actually is way worse than normal. Observe:
To translate that dense text: This is the 8th coldest spring and summer to date ever recorded in SF, and we haven’t reached 75 degrees since May 13, the longest such stretch since 1911. So this time I’m right! It really does suck more than normal.
[CORRECTION: Reader Stephen S. alerts me that it’s even worse than that. There have been no days at or above 75 ALL YEAR, and only two days at 74. He also notes that this has been an all-year phenomenon. 25 out of 28 days in February were below average, and 10 of those didn’t get within 10 degrees of the average high.]
The chill is in part a result of San Francisco’s location between the ocean and the Central Valley, according to Diana Henderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service Forecast Office for the San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey. To the west, the marine layer sits above the cold Pacific. To the east, heat in the valley creates thinner air and low pressure.
The valley becomes like a vacuum that wants to be filled by the heavier marine layer. It pulls that layer over San Francisco, which typically makes the city cooler than other parts of California -- and the country -- in the summer.
This year, in particular, has been unusually cold. It has to do with the jet stream apparently:
Like much of the Bay Area’s unsettled weather this year, the source of the pattern is largely due to the flow of the jet stream — the strong winds that undulate from west to east a few miles above the Earth’s surface.
“The jet stream has basically been aimed right at the Bay Area,” said Jeff Beamish, a meteorologist with Sonoma Technology.
With nowhere else to go, steady rounds of low-pressure systems have been ferried by the jet stream toward the Bay Area for weeks. These systems spin in a counterclockwise fashion, bringing rounds of strong northerly winds to the coast and bay shore.
“The highest temperature so far this month (in San Francisco) was 69 degrees,” said meteorologist Warren Blier, science coordination officer for the National Weather Service San Francisco Bay Area office. “There have been no 70 degree days this June.”
Whatever. That doesn’t help me when I’m wearing a down jacket to take my goddam dog for a walk on June 27.