A high pressure ridge is triggering the first major heat event of the summer, with residents of inland Bay Area cities facing some heat risk Thursday afternoon. But as hot weather sets in over northern California, pollutants also increase.

The high-pressure system will cause hot air to pour down over Northern California. Residents of inland cities like Sacramento, Santa Rosa and Livermore can expect temperatures to hit the upper 80s and mid 90s on Thursday afternoon.

Air pollution is also likely to be picked up by clockwise air movements on Thursday. Pollutants normally blown away by bay and delta breezes accumulate under the influence of the high pressure system.

The National Weather Service is forecasting a moderate heat risk for the inland valleys on Thursday afternoon due to the sudden rise in temperature in the summer’s first heat event. That means the hot weather poses a threat to residents who are sensitive to heat-related illnesses, such as the elderly, day laborers and the homeless.

The North American Weather Model wind forecast for Thursday evening in the Bay Area. Clean, cool air from the Pacific Ocean should lower pollution levels in cities like San Francisco and Oakland. Calm conditions in the North Bay and East Bay will cause pollution levels to gradually increase through Thursday. By sunset, some pollution relief could reach the inland valleys of the East Bay.

Baron/Lynx

AirNow forecast moderate air quality for most of the Bay Area on Thursday. This means residents can expect airborne haze and health concerns for a small number of sensitive individuals. However, Thursday afternoon’s combination of sea and bay breezes are likely to blow the worst of the haze out of the San Francisco Bay area and into the inland valleys.

Inland residents will be hit hardest by hot weather and poor air quality as breezes will be more confined to the coast in the coming days.

The best choice for cool, clean air Thursday through Saturday is to visit coastal and bay towns on the Way of the Sea Winds. Otherwise, high pressure ridges will continue to cause steady increases in temperature and pollution in cities in the interior of the Bay Area and most of California.

glitch on Thursday

San Francisco: The ocean layer will continue to thin, meaning San Franciscans can expect a quick transition from cloudy skies to sunnier skies by 11 am. Some fog may hang around the Great Highway and Twin Peaks in the afternoon, but a sunny day is forecast for most of the city.

Look for daily highs in the mid-60s on the West Side, the Presidio, Pier 39, and the Embarcadero, while downtown San Franciscans along most of Market Street between Castro and Powell Streets have highs in the upper 60s can expect. However, a light breeze is expected to pick up after 2pm, cooling most of the city to the low 60s by evening.

Some scattered clouds could return towards sunset, but weather models are predicting a mostly clear night with overnight lows in the mid-50s.

Pacific Coast and Peninsula: A thin veil of sea clouds is expected along Highway 1 and parts of the San Bruno Gap.

By the afternoon, the gray skies will be replaced by sunshine and warmer air, allowing maximum temperatures to reach the high 60s in Daly City, Pacifica and Half Moon Bay and lower 70s around San Francisco International Airport. Those south of Millbrae and along the I-280 and 101 corridor can expect mostly sunny skies and light winds throughout the afternoon. Keep an eye out for daily highs in the mid to high 70s in Redwood City, Menlo Park and Atherton — 7 to 10 degrees higher than at the start of the week.

Dry air is forecast to blow gently across the peninsula at night, clearing any fog and sea clouds. Expect clear skies as overnight lows fall to mid-50s on the waterfront and lower 50s on the slopes.

North Bay: Patches of sea fog may be observed along the coast of Sonoma and Marin counties in the morning. Light northeasterly winds are then expected to blow into the inland valleys later in the day, clearing most of the cloud cover and making way for a warm, mostly sunny afternoon.

Residents of the Napa, Santa Rosa, and Petaluma Valleys can expect daily highs in the upper 80s, while temperatures for residents of inland Solano County — Fairfield and Vacaville — will likely hit the mid-90s. The sea layer will persist over parts of Marin County and the Delta region, keeping daytime temperatures closer to the low 80s in Novato and San Rafael and in the low 70s in Tiburon and Vallejo.

Light northeast winds will continue to sweep away sea clouds and make for clear skies tonight as overnight lows drop to the mid 50’s.

east bay: In the morning the sun will slowly break through the layers of fog in the hills of Oakland and Berkeley. In the afternoon, the sky is likely to clear up across the region, with the weather models in Alameda and Contra Costa counties predicting mostly sunny skies and light north-easterly winds.

It might be time to unpack the shorts. Rapid warming is forecast for the afternoon in the San Ramon and Livermore Valleys, with residents of Walnut Creek, Dublin and Pleasanton likely to experience highs in the upper 80’s. Some hotspots around Brentwood and Ulmar could hit the lower 90s just before the delta breeze cools in the evening.

Residents closer to the San Francisco Bay and along corridors I-80 and I-880 — Oakland, Alameda, Richmond, Hayward — can expect a much cooler afternoon thanks to a bay breeze. Watch for highs in the mid-70s and gusts of up to 20mph along the water. Skies remain clear as temperatures plummet to as low as 50C overnight across the region.

South Bay and Santa Cruz: Commuters along the Highway 101 corridor between Gilroy and Morgan Hill could catch fog and haze just before sunrise. Dry northeast winds will quickly dispel most of this, leaving mostly sunny skies and warm air. Look for daytime highs in the low 80s throughout the Santa Clara Valley, with mid-80s possible in downtown San Jose just after 1 p.m.

Expect more sea clouds and relatively cooler air in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with weather models pointing towards daily highs in the upper 70’s. Even cooler air and heavier cloud cover are expected along Highway 1 between Santa Cruz and La Selva, shielding the coast from the region’s warmest air and keeping daytime temperatures closer to the mid-60s.

Some of the cloudiest skies in the region will occur at night just along Monterey Bay, while residents of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Clara Valley can expect clear skies. Look for overnight lows in the upper 50s on the waterfront and mid 50s inland.

Reach Gerry Díaz: gerry.diaz@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @geravitywave

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Rather than waiting for certainty in projections of sea level rise, policymakers can now plan for future coastal flooding by addressing existing inequalities among the most vulnerable communities in floodplains, according to Stanford research.

Using a methodology that includes socio-economic data on neighborhood groups of approximately 1,500 people, scientists found that several coastal communities in San Mateo County, California – including half of households in East Palo Alto – are at risk of financial instability or flooding due to existing social factors expected by 2060. Even with flood insurance coverage, these residents would not be able to pay for any damage caused by flooding, which could lead to homelessness or bankruptcy of people, which are essential to the diversity and economic functioning of urban areas. The paper was published in Earth’s Future magazine on July 12th.

“These are workers who run a city, they are the heart and soul of an urban corporation. If you move a significant majority too far outside of the urban area, the functionality of that city crumbles,” said senior co-author Jenny Suckale, assistant professor in geophysics from the Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “How can we ensure that we provide these communities with a future that is not linked to their decline?”

Estimates of flood damage are usually calculated by civil engineers in the form of monetary damage to structures. With their new model called the Stanford Urban Risk Framework (SURF), the researchers are taking a people-centered approach to risk assessment that focuses on those residents who are most likely to lose their livelihood when water floods their homes. While every household in the planned floodplain will be burdened by flood damage, the socio-economic context determines how damaging the costs will be. In several San Mateo County’s coastal communities, more than 50 percent of households will face financial instability.

“If you just look at the dollar amount, you are missing a major component of the problem,” Suckale said. “What could be a nuisance in some churches changes life in other churches – it’s really about being close to a turning point.”

Researchers identified which communities are near a fiscal tipping point by calculating their social risk or financial instability, a metric intended to complement existing assessments of monetary risk through hazard. They overlaid coastal flood maps and building footprints with structural information, took into account projected annual damage from sea level rise and estimated household incomes based on labor and economic data to calculate losses based on census block groups – geographic units used by the U.S. Census Bureau publishes demographic Estimates.

“It was surprising to see in the data how many more households with lower incomes relative to their incomes were affected and how unsustainable it is for these types of households to bear these costs,” said lead author of the study, Avery Bick, a PhD student at the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research who worked on the project as a PhD student at Stanford.

Despite the uncertainty about the extent of future climate change, researchers agree that rising sea levels will exacerbate coastal flooding – a threat that residents from Foster City to East Palo Alto have faced for decades. Many of the highest social risk neighborhoods are made up of single parent households and are more racially diverse than the San Mateo County’s average, according to the study.

“Climate change doesn’t just mean it’s getting hotter or sea levels are rising – it will literally change the fabric of society, especially if we continue to ignore it,” Bick said. “It gave me a sense of how vulnerable the social fabric is to change and how we need to be proactive. Otherwise, it will change in favor of those with more resources.”

Researchers worked with local stakeholders to develop an equitable approach to planning to adjust sea level rise. Through conversations with organizations such as the San Mateo County Office of Sustainability and the US Army Corps of Engineers, as well as community-based groups such as Climate Resilient Communities, El Concilio, and the North Fair Oaks Community Alliance, they learned that what the climate lacks in the discourse was framing the dollar amount of damage in relation to what people can pay for. The team’s approach has involved a shift in awareness, from the amount of money you lose to the value of goods and services you can no longer buy due to the disaster, said Derek Ouyang, co-author of the study, a lecturer in geophysics at Stanford Earth.

“Any investment now can be directly tied to the resilience that prepares communities for future climate threats, whatever they are,” Ouyang said.

Because San Mateo County’s population is both very affluent and low-income, the average cost of flooding versus incomes at the county level “makes it look like you don’t have a big problem,” Suckale said. However, by assessing the impact on a smaller scale, the researchers were able to highlight the problem areas in a way that is more directly useful to policy makers.

The co-authors hope that this new quantitative method can be used to assess social risk on a scale of census blocks in other coastal flood-prone regions or to understand various climate threats from an equitable perspective.

“I think it’s useful to have a social risk metric that makes the actual risk completely independent because then we can simply improve the household’s ability to absorb the disorder, no matter what it is,” Suckale said.

Source of the story:

Materials provided by Stanford University. Originally written by Danielle Torrent Tucker. Note: The content can be edited in terms of style and length.

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SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS (CBS SF / AP) – Drought conditions in California are worsening, and state officials fear wildfires could wreak more damage than last year when the complex fires burned 4% of the state – record damage.

The danger prompted Governor Gavin Newsom this week to urge the state to spend a record $ 2 billion on fighting forest fires. That is twice as much as he suggested in January.

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“We are very clear that we need to step up our efforts here in the state of California, and that is exactly what we started earlier this year,” he said on Monday.

Above-average wildfire potential is expected in the mountains and foothills of California from June through August and possibly into fall, which is the usual main fire season, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center and the Southwest Coordination Center.

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While some parts of the Southwest experienced cool and humid conditions last month, California did not, said Chuck Maxwell, meteorologist and predictive services manager at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, which measures conditions, 94% of California has drought conditions that range from moderate to exceptional.

This year’s fires have burned almost five times as much area as last year at that time. But the 62 square kilometers drawn by about 2,600 fires this year is a small fraction of the total of nearly 10,000 fires last year, and an astronomical 17,231 square kilometers were burned. The fires killed 33 people and burned more than 10,000 houses and other buildings.

In the Bay Area alone, Northern California’s 2020 historic fire season burned more than two million acres – 3,125 square miles – almost three times the size of Chicago, Manhattan and Los Angeles combined.

Last year’s epic fire season lasted so long that it slowed Cal Fire’s attempts to make their own fires – the mandatory burns they increasingly want to include in their long-term endeavors. By April 30th, they were able to deliberately burn 44 square kilometers, a 40% decrease from the previous year.

“Even a dry winter would have allowed the mandatory burns, but officials got off to a late start due to the extreme fire activity in the second half of last year,” said Christine McMorrow, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Safety.

“Mandatory burns are a big part of our strategy,” said Newsom, who added $ 50 million to its proposed budget for them.

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Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter called them “our best, most affordable tool” for clearing both overgrown areas and invasive alien plants. But he warned that “not every piece of California is ready for regulatory fire yet,” with “many areas where it is not safe to set fire to the ground under any circumstances.”

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Smoke from deliberate burns is also a problem, he said, although the state tries not to burn near sensitive places like hospitals. And the state cannot deliberately allow fires to burn on private land without permission and safeguards, Porter said, despite trying to get blanket permission from large forest owners so that the fires can safely continue after they start.

This means that officials in many areas continue to have to use manual crews, machines or animals to clear overgrown areas.

“As soon as we have safe areas to burn, we will reintroduce fire and that will be the most important tool in the future, but I am talking about decades,” Porter said. “We have to build this up gradually over the next many, many years to get to the right place and the right combination.”

The budget proposal, which lawmakers will consider before June 15, includes more than $ 48 million for the launch of a dozen new Cal Fire Fire Hawk helicopters and seven large C-130 air tankers like the ones Newsom said on Monday Fire Brigade Airfield in Sacramento. It has nearly $ 34 million to replace two state helicopter bases and build a new emergency operations center in Southern California.

More than $ 182 million would be spent on an additional 33 firefighters as the state partially offsets a dwindling number of firefighters in inmates from previous releases due to the coronavirus pandemic and years of relaxation of criminal laws. The money includes hiring an additional 1,399 seasonal firefighters. That will bring the total number of seasonal firefighters to nearly 4,000, which equates to nearly 3,400 permanent firefighters, Cal Fire said.

Legislators already approved $ 536 million earlier this year so the state can quickly begin approving local contracts for building fuel quarries near vulnerable communities or managing forest areas.

The rest is included in the budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, though Porter said most of the firefighters have already been hired.
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Associate Press Writer Susan Montoya Bryan contributed to this story from Albuquerque, New Mexico

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