You're now free to shed the scarf and mittens. The Bay Area's cold snap is finally abating, with highs in the sixties expected this weekend.
How cold was it? Maybe not as cold as it seemed.
While San Jose managed to set a new low (by one degree) on Sunday, this hasn't been like, say, December of 1990, when Santa Rosa had consecutive lows of 21, 18 and 19. That one stands out in Jan Null's memory.
"This week we've seen temperatures, in the coldest places, down into the mid-to-upper 20s," said Null, a meteorologist who runs Golden Gate Weather Services. "We've sort of flip-flopped what we had for the month of December."
Since then, a high-pressure system has been parked over the eastern Pacific, and since air flows clockwise around high pressure, "It's arcing up through Alaska, down through British Columbia, and then coming right down the West Coast, so we're getting this relatively cold arctic air," Null explained as the last of the blast was moving through this week. That pattern is shifting, which will warm things up. And with the exception of mandarin oranges, which are super-sensitive to cold, citrus farmers in the Central Valley were not expecting widespread crop damage from this cold snap.