It will be a cold day in August before…

For those less familiar with English sayings, there’s one that goes “It will be a cold day in Hell before…” meaning a nearly impossible event before you will have some other thing happen… Thus the title.

Well, San Francisco has been reprising it’s reputation for a “cold day in August”…

Complete it how you like. Perhaps “… before they will admit it is cooling not warming.”?

Bolding of bits mine.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/The-most-San-Francisco-summer-just-one-day-9186788.php

The most San Francisco summer — just one day in 70s in August

By Kimberly Veklerov and Erin Allday Updated 1:46 pm, Saturday, August 27, 2016

The cool mists of San Francisco have gotten a little carried away this summer, blanketing much of the city in a noirish gloom that has even those who profess to like fog hankering for a ray or two of sunshine.

This August, a month that means searing heat in most other places, has been decidedly cool in the city, according to the collectors of weather records.

San Francisco has seen only one 70-degree day in August, according to meteorologists. The last time the city had a month that wouldn’t budge above 70 at all was 1942, and there have been only two other Augusts on record — in 1917 and 1882 — with that distinct dishonor.

“We had the one day when we reached 70 degrees. That was on the eighth of August. And every other day has been in the 60s,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist for Golden Gate Weather Services who’s been tracking August records.

So just where has all that heat gone? According to the Global Warming theology, it can’t have left the planet. Maybe it went into the ocean to hide for a while. Or maybe “it’s just weather” (since it is cool, not warm…)

SFGate, and really anything to do with San Francisco, is at the extreme of the extreme for left / Socialist / Progressive / out there wing of things. Next, they try to paint cold like only 3 times ever recorded before as not so cold, really:

It hasn’t been a brutally cold month, he noted. Just persistently foggy and maddeningly temperate.

“We’re in an extreme of mildness,” he said.

As if to emphasize this point, the temperature in San Francisco reached a tantalizing 68 degrees early Friday afternoon, with blue skies and sun downtown, but cooled off steadily the rest of the day.

Yeah, an “extreme of mildness”… Have to remember that one when it is 68 in January and they are screaming deadly heat…

And, as usual, the infernal fog rolled in over the beleaguered Sunset District, where residents had gotten a short, teasing glimpse of that seldom seen fiery orb in the sky known as the sun.

“It’s the first sunny day we’ve seen in something like 45 days,” said Roger Cook, owner of Nomad Cyclery on 27th Avenue and Irving, before the fog rolled back in. “Oh, it’s been really foggy. Everybody is talking about it.”

Cook said the relentless pall of gray hasn’t really hurt business, but he constantly has to explain to shivering tourists renting bicycles about the San Francisco climate and why the fog rolls in off the Pacific Ocean. He said he is normally OK with fog, but not this much of it.

“It can be somewhat depressing,” he said. “If you are a normally depressed person, you would get really depressed. I’m not one of those guys, but it does get a bit discouraging.”

August — which some locals have taken to calling “Fogust” — hasn’t been the only cold month. The summer as a whole has been decidedly un-summery. San Francisco has hit the 80s four times this year. And none of those days arrived in the summer months.

“The warmest reading all year was April 6, and it hit 87. Then two more dates in April and one day in May,” said Charles Bell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey. “And that’s been it.”

Yeah, an ‘un-summery’ cold is not cold… then they try to say it’s just normal. Somehow missing the irony that just normal means not warming at all whatsoever…

The irony is that it actually hasn’t been a whole lot cooler, on average, in San Francisco. Historically, high temperatures in August average 66 degrees, and this month, the city has been averaging 64, making it about the 37th-coolest August on record, Bell said.

Last year, he said, the average high for the month was 72 — the ninth-hottest August. A drop like that in one year can feel pretty significant in a city that doesn’t get a lot of big shifts in temperature, he said.

So yeah, it’s normal. Normal as in not warming. Normal as is cold like it has only been 3 times before.

[…]
Not everybody wandering around in the biting wind on the Golden Gate Bridge or at other foggy attractions in the city was thrilled by the crisp coastal temperatures.

Crista Lucey, 57, a San Francisco accountant who was showing the Golden Gate Bridge to some visitors from France, said the local weather can catch people from hot places by surprise.

“Our weather is so fickle,” Lucey said. “I’m surprised by how much fog we’ve been seeing. Very wet. Very windy.”

Jamie Andrew, 30, from London, and his girlfriend, Ella Young, 28, weren’t quite ready for the cold.

“We’re wearing every piece of clothing we brought,” Andrew said. “It’s certainly colder than we thought it’d be.”

When folks from London are complaining about the cold and fog, it’s pretty darned cold and foggy…

So why does this happen? Well, the return of old weather patterns. Now don’t go expecting anyone to say maybe it had been warm for a few decades because of a cyclical PDO driven weather change… but that’s why it got cold again:

There won’t be much use for beach towels, sunscreen or bathing suits in or around San Francisco until after Labor Day, Bell said. The low-pressure front that’s causing the cooler temperatures — optimists call it the Bay Area’s “natural air conditioner” — has set up camp over the West Coast and doesn’t seem inclined to blow off any time soon.

“We have to have a pattern change, and there’s not an indication of that coming,” Bell said. “Even looking out two weeks.

“If it makes you feel better, and I don’t know why it would,” he said, “we’re having the same issues down here in Monterey, day after day after day. If people want the heat, they’re going to have to go well inland.”

It was 79 in Sonoma, and Stockton hit 87 Friday. There was no sign of fog in Redding, which was a decidedly summery 97 degrees.

I will note in passing that it’s been that way elsewhere on the coast, too, as they point out. Also note they selected Stockton and Redding for inland temperatures. Stockton is near the middle of the Central Valley and can get some bay winds bringing a bit of cool, so while it often reaches 90 to 100+ in August, it usually abates after 2 or 3 days when the SF fog flow reaches more inland (as it dries out and warms). 87 F is relatively cool, but essentially a normal August temperature. I grew up about 90 miles south of Redding. In between it and my old home town is Red Bluff. Redding was often cooler than Red Bluff, but not by a lot. It is on the start of the climb into the Cascade Mountains. Normal for August is a few 100+ F days, some up to 110F, and not much below 90 to 95 F. We rejoiced at a 90 F day… So again, 97 F is smack dab normal. No “global warming” there, either.

Do note that July was not all that warm either, so this isn’t a weather “fluke”, but rather a return to older prior trends, but they couldn’t help getting in a “Global Warming” dig using February weather:

http://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/Coldest-July-La-Nina-San-francisco-weather-fog-9122486.php

Though they just MUST appeal to February weather as counterpoint. Perhaps we ought to remind them February was just “extreme moderation” ;-)

San Francisco chilled by coldest July in years, after hottest February temperatures in three decades

By Brandon Mercer Updated 9:34 am, Friday, August 5, 2016

The coldest winter I ever knew was July of 2016 in San Francisco. Literally, we had warmer evenings back in mid-winter. With the month’s climate data now in, the average high temperature for July only hit 65.2–the coldest July in six years–while February’s average daily high was 66.4 degrees as measured in downtown San Francisco.

While July felt downright chilly, August so far is on track to have colder afternoons than February too, averaging just 65.7 for the daily high temperatures so far.

Now, to be clear, we’re talking about the temperatures we notice — the daily high.

February’s lows still get colder than July’s lows, bringing the overall average temperatures down, but most people aren’t awake to feel the daily low temperature overnight. It’s those afternoon highs that feel so frigid. February enjoyed 77 degrees one sunny afternoon this year, while we had one July afternoon where it never got above 59.

As I walked upwind from the Chronicle toward BART on a “hot August night” this week, face pelted by a fog so heavy it could be more accurately called drizzle, and with hands in my pockets to avoid the chill, I wondered just how cold our summer will remain.

Today, I actually put my coat on. Indoors.

Then they launch into a full on Self Delusion episode:

The real story though is not the summer cold, but the winter heat. Downtown had the hottest average high temperatures in February in 28 years.

Just ignore that man behind the curtain… indulge your confirmation bias and self delusion… /sarc;

No, the real story is the PDO shift and the return of the pattern of 30 years ago (and of the time of Mark Twain who was the first to note that the coldest winter he knew was a summer in San Francisco… but the author above didn’t credit the original).

He does note that the ocean has changed state, but misses the point that this means the heat didn’t run off to hide in the ocean, as it is the source of the cold:

Blame the ocean. The sea surface temperature off the coast is like setting your home’s thermostat to either “Heat or Cool.”

The cooler the ocean, the cooler the city by the ocean. Even as the Central Valley broils under 105+ degree heat.

The ocean water has been around 52 degrees off our coast this summer.

Oh, and do note the “broils under 105+”. As noted above, that is called “absolutely normal”. Growing up in that central valley, I remember one day of 117 F near Marysville, and more August days of 110 and 110+ F than I can count. No A/C, just a ‘swamp cooler’, so we watched that thermometer / news reports closely. A 105 F day was “nice” and a 95 F day a treat.

Then there is this tasty bit. They note that the airport, where the official temps are now taken, is biased against the cool:

The difference in summer and winter temperatures is most noticeable in downtown San Francisco. If you explore the official climate records using the weather station at San Francisco International Airport, you won’t find the same phenomenon, because the cold blasts in July don’t impact the airport as much as they do downtown.

Now there was no SFO Airport in the 1800s, the early 1900s, the 1920s etc. It is located well south of S.F. and near the inland bay with warmer water nearby. So about those global warming homogenization of that “grid cell”…

They seem to have ‘gotten schooled’ by someone with weather knowledge over a La Niña claim, and an interesting meander follows:

The coldest July average high temperatures on record for Downtown San Francisco? 1962, when the average high temperature barely made it out of the fifties: 60.4. (Records have been kept for this station since 1921.)

September and October are coming, for all your heat seekers. Those are our warmest months of the year.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story referenced a correlation between El Niño and La Niña conditions influencing our coastal ocean temperatures. After studying conflicting analyses of the impacts of the equatorial ocean waters on our local micro climates, we have chosen to remove that discussion. Continue reading for why.

While forecasters draw many different conclusions about the cause of our incredibly complex ocean temperatures and their influence on our micro climates, one meteorologist says 40 years experience suggests caution.

Jan Null from Golden Gate Weather Services tells SFGATE, “When you have a long pervasive El Niño, you are warming up the entire Pacific, but we’re much more influenced than normal wind patterns than anything going on in the tropics.”

He cautions that all the stories about warm water fishes or other warm water irregularities spotted along the California coast are not necessarily because of El Niño, and our summer’s cold ocean temperatures this year and in other years are not necessarily directly correlated to La Niña’s colder ocean conditions either.

Null explains that the warmer water we had this past winter actually pre-dated El Niño occurring, and he says the biggest phenomenon influencing our warm winter was the “warm blob” — a strange mass of warmer water that lurked off the coast, up into the Gulf of Alaska, dramatically influencing local conditions.

As for La Niña right now?

The colder ocean temperatures have already formed along the equator indicating a La Niña is forming, but it must continue to be colder than normal for three months before a La Niña condition is officially called.

So, parsing the weather speak, you could say “a La Niña appears to be forming, and the ocean is at La Niña levels, but it’s not yet a La Niña, because it hasn’t lasted for three months.”

With that, we’ll just say, enjoy what Jan Null calls “Fogust” in San Francisco.

Ah, the joys of watching folks stuck in a meme trying to interpret realty through it.

This is just a return to the normal of pre-1977 Great Pacific Shift as it was then known, or the PDO flip as we now call it in a shorthand way. It’s a 60 ish year cycle, so anyone under about 40 has no clue what was normal then. I’d guess for most folks they had to be born in at least 1965 and in California and stayed here to “have clue”. Oh, and noticed / watched the weather and weather news a lot…

Well, with that, I now return you to your “extreme moderation” in climate and hope you enjoyed a pleasant August weekend.

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