I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s hot in California.
A West Coast heat wave that began last week has led to a scorching Independence Day and, for many, an even hotter weekend. A high pressure system over much of the West is trapping hot air — baking Las Vegas, the Pacific Northwest and large swaths of the Golden State.
While California’s coasts were largely spared from the worst of the heat, several areas near the coast set daily temperature records over the long holiday weekend, meaning some communities had their warmest July 4th (or July 5th or 6th) in history. Among the at least two dozen places in California that broke daily records last week were San Jose, Fresno, Oakland, Branded, Levermore, San Rafael And Paso Robles.
On Friday and Saturday, when the heat wave was at its peak across much of the state, at least three cities saw their highest temperatures ever recorded.
In the north the temperatures are in To blushthe capital of Shasta County, rose to 119 degrees, and Ukiahcloser to the coast in Mendocino County, it tied its all-time high of 117. In Southern California, Palm Springs reached an unprecedented temperature of 124 degrees.
“This is a record-breaking heat wave,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an online news conference over the weekend. Some people in the state, he said, had “not only experienced the hottest day on record, but the hottest day that their parents or grandparents would have ever experienced.”
While records often attract attention, what matters most is how long the extreme heat lasts.
The heat wave began on Tuesday and is expected to continue into the week, with temperatures 15 to 30 degrees above normal, the National Weather Service predicts. That means people without air conditioning will have had little to no respite for nearly two weeks, even at night, when temperatures remained unusually high.
The longer these conditions persist, the drier the state’s grass and brush will become, steadily increasing the risk of wildfires. Since the heat wave began, more than 50 wildfires have broken out in California, including a large fire in an area inland from Santa Barbara County that had grown to more than 20,000 acres by Monday morning.
And it’s not just California. “The extremely dangerous heat wave in the West is expected to continue and expand into the Northwest and Northern High Plains over the next several days,” the Weather Service said Sunday. “Dozens of daily record temperatures are forecast to be equaled or broken during the workweek.”
James White, a meteorologist with the Weather Service’s Eureka office, said most climate models showed above-average temperatures in his northwestern region of the state for at least the next 10 days. While temperatures will be slightly cooler than over the weekend, many inland areas will still reach triple digits.
“That’s still what we would classify as a moderate to even high heat risk,” White told me.
For more:
Last year, Cameron Luther, who was 23, spent months restoring a butterscotch-yellow 1966 Porsche in Monterey as part of a deal to buy it from its 94-year-old owner. Luther commuted five hours from his job in Santa Monica to work on the car, which he said was the kind he’d always wanted.
Read the full story in The Times.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Soumya
PS Here is Today’s Mini Crossword.
Halina Bennet and Luke Caramanico contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.
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