Bay sees record heat and maybe driest January BAY AREA

Robert Hardy (left) from San Francisco doing a few pull ups at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, January 12, 2009. Robert Hardy (left) from San Francisco doing a few pull ups at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, January 12, 2009. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Bay sees record heat and maybe driest January 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

High-temperature records fell like imaginary raindrops in the Bay Area on Monday, among the warmest mid-January days ever.

It's also shaping up to be one of the driest Januarys ever - if not the driest. There's been almost no rain this month, and none is in sight, the National Weather Service says.

The thermometer hit 74 in downtown San Francisco, breaking the old record for Jan. 12 of 67, set in 1948.

"We broke the records pretty much everywhere," said weather service meteorologist Brian Tentinger. "Breaking them wasn't hard. This wasn't extreme heat, but it was very abnormal for January."

The heat marks got their biggest thumping in Santa Rosa, where it was 84 degrees. The old mark was 66, set in 1967.

The 77 degrees recorded at Oakland International Airport made it the warmest January day ever at that location. The old mark was 75, set on Jan. 8, 1962. Downtown Oakland merely set a record for the date at 76 degrees, 11 degrees better than the old mark from 1980.

In San Rafael, it was 75, breaking the mark of 68, set in 1948. In San Jose, it was 77, six degrees warmer than 1948's record.

Heat records also fell in Kentfield (74, besting the 66 recorded in 1918), Moffett Field (72, beating the 65 set in 1980) and Gilroy (73, nudging out the 72 set in 1959).

The unseasonably warm weather is expected to continue, although the temperatures could decline a few degrees in the North Bay, Tentinger said. That means the highest January temperature ever in San Francisco - 79 degrees - may be safe.

Leone Evans, 89, of Oakland didn't need a thermometer to tell her that it was "absolutely gorgeous."

Evans left her home state of Oregon - and its rainy weather - in the 1940s and vowed never to return. She hasn't.

"We have the most beautiful weather in the world," Evans proclaimed as she took a breather on a bench at Snow Park near Lake Merritt.

Bob Benjamin of the National Weather Service said the main reason it's so warm is "the wind component" - strong gusts coming off the land, the reverse of the Bay Area's normal, cooler onshore flow. The strongest gust atop Mount Diablo on Monday morning was 78 mph, and winds elsewhere in the North and East Bay hills exceeded 50 mph.

The warm weather is the result of a fairly strong high-pressure system that is bumping storms far to the north, Benjamin said. It's a pattern that has been entrenched most of the fall and winter, an unwelcome development for a state coming off two consecutive years of below-average rainfall.

Since the start of the rain year July 1, rainfall in San Francisco has totaled just 56 percent of average. It's been so dry since New Year's Day that the National Weather Service is starting to keep an eye on whether this will be the driest January ever in the Bay Area.

The warm weather is not doing the Sierra snowpack any favors. To state water officials, good weather is bad and bad weather is good.

The snowpack is about 67 percent of normal, said Matt Notley, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources. That figure will go down in light of the next several days of predicted clear skies.

"We're very concerned we're experiencing another dry winter," Notley said. "Even an average year this year would not bring us out of drought."

The driest January on record in San Francisco was in 1920, when 0.26 of an inch of rain fell. So far this January, the city is 0.02 of an inch short of that.

In Oakland, the driest January was in 1976, during the first of two straight bone-dry years when mandatory rationing was the norm in Northern California and lawns by the thousands went unwatered.

The January total that year was 0.31 of an inch; so far this January, Oakland has gotten 0.28.