Heat wave reaches ‘the tail end’ in Southern California
The temperature is rising at the “tail end” of the Bay Area, prompting the National Weather Service Saturday to warn of the region’s first heat wave since 2016.
The heat wave is expected to stretch from the Monterey Peninsula south to San Diego, where the temperature reached a daily high of 90 degrees Fahrenheit Saturday.
The temperature in Los Angeles and San Francisco was in the 90s and 70s, respectively.
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High temperatures in the Bay Area over the course of a day usually drop below the 90s in the afternoon.
It’s the first such heat wave in Southern California since last summer in the area between the Pacific and the Bay. The National Weather Service said the number of days the mercury reached 94 degrees was the highest since the summer of 2016.
“So just to give you a bit of a reality check — the heat wave is now officially the largest since at least 2016,” the weather service wrote on Twitter. “But since we’ve seen some heatwaves before, we knew this one would come, and we certainly didn’t want it to get any worse.”
A heat wave is the rise of heat above 99 degrees Fahrenheit over 24 hours. The daily high temperature for Saturday was 90 degrees, which is a record for this date.
But the heat was not just limited to the Pacific Coast. The weather service said that in the Bay Area, the temperature reached 90 degrees F Saturday in a few locations.
“The majority of locations were in the “mid-upper” 90s, which is a bit surprising, considering the Bay Area typically has a cooler summer than the rest of the state,” the weather service said on Twitter.
“I’m curious as to why these were the hottest spots and not anywhere else in the Bay Area,” said weather service meteorologist Alex Kehoe. “This is a different heat wave in my mind from last year. There was really no one area that was heating up quite as quickly.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re experiencing a new heat wave. We’re seeing this heatwave moving