Blog Article
Nice Weather This Week: Traveling Ridge vs. LA's Quiet Streak
A Beautiful-tier ridge moves from Sioux Falls to Wisconsin to the Great Lakes this week, while LA and the Sacramento foothills quietly post the best full-week scores in the country.
One Ridge Keeps Changing Zip Codes, One Region Just Quietly Wins the Whole Week
Somewhere in Sioux Falls this morning, somebody's having a patio breakfast in the mid-50s that'll climb to a dry, sunny 77°F by afternoon. Somewhere in Los Angeles, somebody's having a completely unremarkable Wednesday: comfortable, a little hazy, nothing to write home about. Both of those people are standing in genuinely good weather today. Only one of them is going to be able to say that seven days from now.
That's the split-screen story this week. A traveling high-pressure ridge is handing out the day's single best category, Beautiful, to a different region almost every 24 hours. Meanwhile, a much less flashy stretch of Southern California and the Sacramento Valley foothills is putting up the best cumulative week on the board, day after day of Nice without ever cracking the top tier. Neither pattern is wrong. They're just different kinds of good.
Today's Beautiful Zone: The Northern Plains and Interior Northwest
Right now the nicest air in the country runs through Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Missoula, and Pullman, with Walla Walla, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, and Portland close behind in Nice territory. It's dry, post-frontal air behind this week's front: highs near 77°F, lows in the mid-50s, dewpoints around 47°F, winds a gentle 9 mph, and rain chances basically zero. Air quality is solid too, with AQI readings in the mid-40s. This is the kind of day made for a hike outside Missoula or a farmers market stroll in Sioux Falls without a second thought about sunscreen reapplication or a rain jacket.
It's not flawless. Missoula's winds may swing westerly and choppy on area lakes late in the day, and out toward Winslow and Flagstaff, UV runs a touch high (around 7.5) with afternoon highs pushing into the 90s at lower Arizona elevations. Central and southern Wyoming also has an elevated fire weather risk today from dry, breezy conditions leeward of the mountains, so it's not a day for careless campfires anywhere in that corridor.
Tomorrow It Moves to Wisconsin and Iowa, Friday It's the Great Lakes
This is the same ridge that's been touring the country all week, and it's not done relocating. Thursday, the Beautiful tier shifts to Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, and southern Minnesota. Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Green Bay, Eau Claire, and Dubuque all land in the high 80s to low 90s on the nice-weather scale, with highs near 75°F, dewpoints near 56°F, and AQI down around 40. The only thing keeping that zone from the very top of the scale is air quality sitting just above the cleanest-air threshold, not the weather itself, which is about as dialed-in as September gets.
By Friday the ridge slides east again, and the best air of the day settles over the central Northeast and eastern Great Lakes. Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Syracuse, and Erie all score in the low 90s, riding a dry post-frontal air mass with highs near 70-71°F, dewpoints near 51°F, and essentially no rain risk. It's genuinely close to as good as the comfort math allows this week.
While that ridge tours the country, WPC is already flagging what comes next: the front producing today's Ohio Valley severe risk (a Slight risk of severe storms from eastern Ohio into western New York) clears out, but a broader pattern of returning heat is forecast across much of the eastern U.S. behind it, so enjoy Friday's Great Lakes stretch while it lasts.
The Quiet Winner: The LA Basin and the Sacramento Foothills
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only look at any single day. Pull the whole seven-day window and the highest average scores in the country belong to a long list of Los Angeles-area communities: Westmont, Florence-Graham, Huntington Park, Koreatown, Silver Lake, Hollywood, and Los Angeles itself, all averaging in the low 80s with five Nice-or-better days out of seven. None of them ever touch Beautiful. They don't need to. They just don't have a bad day either, and today one of them actually matched the national ceiling: LA posted a 92 on today's score, tying Sioux Falls and Missoula for the day's best number, largely on the strength of a comfortable coastal air mass working against the valley heat.
That valley heat is worth flagging directly, because it's the honest caveat here: Sacramento itself ran hot today, with highs near 102°F pushing its score down into the FAIR range even as nearby coastal LA neighborhoods stayed comfortable. If you're headed to today's Toronto Blue Jays at Athletics game in Sacramento, that's an afternoon for shade and water, not a picnic blanket. Meanwhile fans at Cardinals-Giants in San Francisco or Nationals-Padres in San Diego are sitting in genuinely pleasant coastal air.
Zoom out even further and the Sacramento Valley foothills, not the valley floor, own the most impressive number in the whole dataset: Vacaville, Napa, El Dorado Hills, Granite Bay, Cameron Park, Auburn, and Placerville are all riding live 90-day streaks of Nice-or-better weather, a run that stretches back to mid-June. That's an entire summer without a genuinely rough weather day in that corridor. It won't last forever, but right now it's the longest quiet run on the board.
Elsewhere in the Outlook
Days 4 through 7 push the traveling ridge's ceiling down a notch, capped at Nice rather than Beautiful, as the best air drifts from a Northeast/Southern California pocket into the California Central Valley and Great Basin, then finally into the interior Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West by the weekend. San Diego, Boise, Bakersfield, and Sacramento's neighbors all take turns near the top of that lower ceiling. The Central Plains and Midwest, by contrast, stay stuck in Decent territory most of the period behind a stalled front bringing repeat shower and thunderstorm chances, so if your travel plans run through Chicago or Omaha this weekend, keep an umbrella in the car.
For the day-by-day and week-by-week breakdown of exactly which cities are trading places at the top, the full Nice Weather outlook page tracks all of it, including the regional rankings and live streak leaderboard mentioned here.
Bottom line for planning: if you want the single best day anywhere in the country, follow the ridge. It's Sioux Falls and Missoula today, Wisconsin tomorrow, the Great Lakes Friday. If you just want a week where nothing goes wrong, book it in the LA basin or the Sacramento foothills, no fireworks required.