A flurry of temperature records were broken across the Bay Area on Friday and Saturday amid an early arrival of springlike weather.
High temperatures climbed well into the 70s, and a few cities even reached the low 80s, 10 to 20 degrees above normal for late February. A humid air mass kept temperatures elevated at night, with lows dropping only to the 50s to low 60s in many places.
On Friday, Oakland reached 83 degrees and Half Moon Bay hit 79 degrees, breaking the highest temperatures recorded in those cities in any month of meteorological winter, which runs from December through February. Temperature data dates back to 1970 in Oakland and 1939 in Half Moon Bay.
San Jose set a new daily record Saturday, reaching 79 degrees. San Rafael’s high of 78 degrees Friday was a new daily record. Richmond also measured a high of 78, tying a daily record.
San Francisco topped out at 76 degrees Friday and 75 degrees Saturday. Neither day broke a temperature record, but the city’s first 75-degree readings of 2026 came a month earlier than a typical year. Friday’s low temperature of 58 degrees was the highest in the city’s record for any Feb. 27 since 1875.
The historic late-February warmth stemmed from a high-pressure system centered over Baja California that steered storms away from the Southwest and allowed the air mass to bake beneath it.
That area of high pressure left its mark, shattering February temperature records in Southern California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and much of Mexico.
Falcon Dam, Texas, hit 106 degrees Friday, marking the highest winter temperature ever recorded in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Parts of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts in California and Arizona soared into the triple digits.
Visitors check out Alamo Square Park on Friday, an unseasonably warm winter day in San Francisco. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)
South Lake Tahoe’s high temperature of 60 degrees Saturday was its warmest since November. Snow depth shrank by 2 to 4 feet across the Tahoe basin in the past week amid a spell of warm, occasionally rainy conditions. The warm weather wiped away nearly all of the accumulations from the mid-February blizzard at some snow-measuring sites.
Cooler weather returned to the Bay Area on Sunday as a fog bank blanketed San Francisco, dropping temperatures to the 50s. Drizzle was expected to accompany the fog by Sunday night. Meanwhile, record heat was forecast to continue in the Southwest on Sunday before a slight drop in temperatures Monday and a more pronounced cooldown Tuesday.
Meteorological winter finished as the warmest on record across many major cities in the West, including Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Locally, it was the warmest winter on record in Half Moon Bay.
Winters are becoming warmer across the West as a result of climate change. California’s winter temperatures are an average of 1 to 3 degrees warmer now than in 1970, according to Climate Central.
This article originally published at Winter temperature records shattered across Bay Area, California.
