Blog Article
Bay Area's 90-Day Nice Weather Streak Keeps Rolling
A 90-day Nice weather streak holds across the Bay Area while Oregon's Rogue Valley and New Mexico post the week's best scores. Full breakdown of today's top pockets.
The Bay Area Hasn't Had a Bad Weather Day Since July, and the Streak Just Keeps Going
Every headline this week has a hurricane in it. Isaias is coming ashore near Pensacola, Rachel is spinning off Baja, and the Gulf Coast is bracing for landfall impacts. That's real, and it matters. But tucked inside today's Nice Weather data is a completely different kind of story, one that's been quietly building for three months with nobody really talking about it.
90 Days and Counting
According to our streak tracking, which goes back to July 12, a long list of San Francisco Bay Area cities has not had a single day drop below the current Nice threshold in that entire span. Oakland, Stockton, Hayward, Roseville, Concord, Vallejo, Berkeley, Fairfield, Richmond, Antioch, Vacaville, Napa, Alameda, San Ramon, Pleasanton, and more are all sitting at a 90-day live streak today, which is the full length of our data window. Several of these towns, including Stockton, Roseville, Arden-Arcade, Citrus Heights, and Tracy, even touched a Perfect-tier day back on August 29 along the way. That's not a lucky week. That's an entire summer and fall where the marine layer, the dry air, and the lack of smoke all lined up almost every single day.
The WPC's short-term discussion today notes that the recent heatwave over much of California is finally ending as a bigger pattern change moves into the West, so even the hot stretch didn't knock these towns out of Nice territory on the scoring side. That's worth sitting with for a second: three months without a bad outdoor day in one of the most populated corners of the country.
Wine Country and the Rogue Valley Are Riding the Same Air
Zoom out to this week specifically, and the weekly top-cities list is basically a love letter to Northern California and southern Oregon. Rogue River, Williams, and Wimer, Oregon, the small towns that ring the Rogue Valley near Grants Pass, are the top three spots in the country for the week, each landing a Nice-or-better score all seven days with a mean score of 79.1. Right behind them, a long run of Sonoma County towns, Sonoma, Boyes Hot Springs, Glen Ellen, Kenwood, El Verano, Yountville, and the Bay Area towns of Vallejo, Martinez, Benicia, and Winters, all hit the same seven-for-seven mark, peaking at a score of 82 around Tuesday the 14th.
New Mexico has its own version of this streak story. Carrizozo and Capitan post a 79.0 and 78.8 weekly mean, both touching 92 today under clear high desert skies. That's the same air mass giving Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Clovis, and Alamogordo their best scores of the week right now.
Today's Two Best Pockets
Friday's outlook has a genuine ceiling of Beautiful in two separated spots: the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico and west Texas, and the Green Bay area of the western Great Lakes. Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Clovis, and Alamogordo are all scoring 92, with dry air, 47-degree dewpoints, and barely any cloud cover. Green Bay matches that 92 with cooler air, a 65-degree high, and a 53-degree dewpoint. Neither pocket actually clears the stricter Perfect gate today, mostly because wind in the low teens and highs in the low 70s keep the temperature and wind sub-scores just shy of triple digits, but this is about as good as October gets in both places.
Marinette, Wisconsin, and Menominee, Michigan, right on the Green Bay, are the single best individual scores anywhere in the country today at 99.2.
For the broader central Plains and Midwest, the story is less clean. Warmer highs in the mid-to-upper 70s and wind gusting into the upper teens and 20s keep that corridor in Fair or Decent territory, and about 2 percent of that zone has gusts strong enough to trigger a severe-wind cap regardless of how the rest of the profile looks.
Sunday's One-Day Wonder: Northern Washington
Looking ahead to Sunday, a tight corridor from Seattle up through Bellingham, Olympia, Aberdeen, and Sequim reaches Beautiful behind a clearing cold front, the best single pocket anywhere in the Day 3 outlook. Highs only in the upper 50s, 0 percent cloud cover, 0 percent rain chance, and an air quality index near 32 make it the cleanest air in this entire outlook. Bring a jacket for the morning chill, since dewpoints near 39 degrees mean this is crisp fall weather, not warm patio weather.
The rest of the West Coast and Gulf locations, San Jose, San Francisco, Portland, New Orleans, and Sacramento, land in Nice territory the same day, capped mainly by an AQI reading that sits one point above the Beautiful threshold rather than by any actual bad weather ingredient.
What Comes Next
Days 4 through 7 carry a forecast-day ceiling of Nice, not Beautiful or Perfect, and the best Nice zone drifts around the map as a warm ridge builds. By Monday, Jacksonville, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, and Birmingham cluster together in the low 80s, a nice bit of recovery weather for the Southeast once Isaias finally clears out. By Wednesday and Thursday, the best scores shift west again toward Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, and Bakersfield.
Two caveats worth knowing if you're planning around any of this. First, the central Plains and Midwest stay pinned in Decent-to-Fair territory the whole stretch as a slow-moving storm system builds wind and eventually some thunderstorm risk by Wednesday and Thursday. Second, moisture from Tropical Storm Rachel is aimed more at Southern California, the Desert Southwest, and the Great Basin than at the Bay Area itself, with a slight risk of excessive rainfall already posted for southeast California and Arizona this weekend into early next week. The 90-day Bay Area streak looks safe for now, but if you're in Riverside County or the low desert, don't bank on the same dry run holding.
If you want to track any of these streaks as they play out, the full breakdown lives on the Nice Weather outlook page, updated daily with the zone math behind every score. And if you're near Austin this weekend for ACL's second weekend, you're not far off from the same dry, sunny air pattern keeping Waco and Killeen in Nice territory on Saturday.
Three months without a bad day is a real number, not a feeling. Enjoy it while it lasts, Bay Area.