Blog Article
Best Nice Weather Day of the Week Hits the Pacific Northwest
Portland, Boise, and Spokane post the top nice-weather scores of the entire week today, before comfort shifts to California and finally the Upper Midwest.
Today Is the Best Day of the Whole Week, and Almost Nobody Outside the Pacific Northwest Will Feel It
Something worth noticing before the day gets away from you: July 15 is the single best-scoring day in our entire seven-day outlook. Of the thousands of cities we track, more of them post their best day of the whole week today than on any other day, by a wide margin. That comfort is stacked almost entirely over the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West, and it is not sticking around in that exact form.
Today: Portland, Boise, and Spokane Hit Beautiful
Portland, Boise, Spokane, Salem, Eugene, Olympia, Twin Falls, and El Dorado Hills all score 92 today, landing in Beautiful territory, our second-highest tier. A broad ridge over the central U.S. is nudging a Pacific trough just offshore, and the result is a dry, clean airmass settling over the inland Northwest. Dewpoints are sitting in the low 50s, the single best number in the whole dataset today, and sky cover across the zone averages just 12 percent. Air quality is excellent too, with an AQI around 46.
It is not flawless. Boise and El Dorado Hills push into the low 90s, and UV runs around 8, so midday shade and sunscreen still matter even on a Beautiful day. If you are headed toward the Rogue Valley, smoke from the East Evans Creek Fire is nudging air quality down locally in Medford, though the wider region still reads clean. Seattle sits a notch back at Nice today, mostly on lingering coastal cloud, and Coos Bay gets stuck at 72 for the same reason. Marine stratus does what marine stratus does.
Thursday: The Pocket Shrinks, and the Heat Wave Takes Over the Middle of the Country
By Thursday the Beautiful tier collapses to a narrow strip through the Rogue Valley and far northern California, with Medford, Weaverville, Cave Junction, and Etna clustering near 92. Everywhere else, the ceiling drops to Nice at best. A dangerous, prolonged heat wave is settling over the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, with highs pushing into the upper 90s and low 100s in spots like Aberdeen and Bismarck. That heat is aggressive enough that 17 to 22 percent of gridpoints in some Plains zones get excluded from the outlook entirely for being too hot to register.
Here is a wrinkle worth flagging honestly: Sioux Falls shows up in the Nice tier on Thursday despite sitting inside that same heat-wave region. Individual station numbers can look better than the regional headline suggests, mostly on drier dewpoints cutting the mugginess even as the thermometer runs hot. Worth remembering that a decent score does not always mean a mild day, just a tolerable one for that specific spot.
California's coastal ranges and Central Valley also pick up elevated fire weather risk Thursday, with onshore flow and downslope drying feeding gusty, dry conditions even as the nice-weather scores there look fine. Good weather and fire danger can coexist.
Friday: Oregon's Interior Valleys Get Their Turn Again
Friday brings Beautiful back to the Willamette and Columbia corridors, with Eugene topping out at 92 and Portland, Salem, and Longview at 82. Dewpoints in the high 40s and cloud cover around 5 percent are doing the heavy lifting. Meanwhile a broader Nice tier spreads down the West Coast, with Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, and Bakersfield all landing at 82. High pressure is also building into the Northeast by Friday, cooling and drying things out enough to matter for anyone catching the Rays-Red Sox series in Boston or the Dodgers-Yankees game in the Bronx that evening. It is not a Nice-tier day there yet, but the humidity finally breaks.
The Weekend Stretch: California and the Northwest Settle Into a Groove
Saturday through Monday, the map stops changing much. Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Riverside, and a long list of Southern California cities hold steady at Nice, day after day. Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine, Garden Grove, and Oceanside are all riding 37-day live streaks of Nice-or-better weather right now, one of the longest active runs anywhere in the country. If you want the single most dependable city in the whole outlook this week, it is Laytonville, a tiny Mendocino County town of about 1,200 people, which posts the highest seven-day mean score in our dataset. If you are in Seattle for the Giants-Mariners game on the 17th, you are catching that same stretch of Nice-tier comfort at the ballpark.
The tradeoff is the ceiling. Nothing in this stretch climbs back to Beautiful for California or the coastal Northwest, and heat stress keeps clipping the Plains and Midwest at Fair or Decent as the same upper ridge that's been anchored there all week holds its ground. For the full current breakdown by city, the Nice Weather outlook page tracks it live as numbers update.
Sunday: The Best Weather Finally Finds the Upper Midwest
By Day 7, the pattern flips. A trough noted in the CPC's extended guidance retrogrades enough to draw the best air into the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa, and that zone posts the single best score of the entire outlook period, around 80. Omaha, Minneapolis, Lincoln, Fargo, and Rochester all reach Beautiful, with highs near 83 and dewpoints in the mid-50s, a real break after a stretch of anomalous heat and humidity that WPC has been warning about for the same region. This is seven days out, so treat it as a good bet rather than a lock, but it lines up with a broader pattern shift the extended discussion has been flagging since earlier this week.
The Short Version
If you can get outside today, do it in Boise, Spokane, or the Willamette Valley. If you are stuck on the coast this weekend, Southern California and the Northwest coast will treat you fine, just don't expect it to climb past Nice. And if you're in the Dakotas or Minnesota gutting out this week's heat, relief with genuinely Beautiful air is on the way by Sunday.