The San Francisco Bay Area entered a two-week warm spell on Friday under a formal National Weather Service heat advisory, with temperatures forecast to run 10 to 20 degrees above average and inland areas projected to reach 103°F this weekend — the same days that up to 750,000 people are expected in the unshaded meadows of Golden Gate Park for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Visitors planning any outdoor time in the Bay Area through mid-October face a health risk that the region’s mild-weather reputation does not prepare them for.
The advisory, issued by NWS San Francisco at 9:43 a.m. PDT on October 1, runs from 11 a.m. Saturday through 10 p.m. PDT Sunday and covers a broad swath of the region: the East Bay and San Francisco Bay shoreline, the Santa Clara Valley, the Santa Cruz Mountains, the North Bay interior mountains, and portions of Monterey and San Benito counties. The weather service warns that the heat poses a health risk to anyone without adequate cooling or hydration — not just elderly travelers or people with preexisting conditions.
The warm spell is not a weekend-only event. The SF Chronicle, citing National Weather Service modeling, reported that above-normal temperatures are forecast to persist through at least the third week of October, and that the high-pressure system responsible could strengthen further next week — in part due to typhoon influences in the western Pacific — potentially pushing triple-digit temperatures into inland North Bay and East Bay valleys. NWS’s Climate Prediction Center puts the probability of above-normal temperatures from October 5 through 11 at more than 70 percent. What begins as a heat advisory weekend is, by all available forecasting, a sustained and significantly above-average two weeks.
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Opens Today Into a Heat Advisory
The timing directly hits the Bay Area’s biggest October travel draw. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the free three-day music festival held in Golden Gate Park’s western meadows — Hellman Hollow, Lindley Meadow, and Marx Meadow — opened Friday, October 2, and runs through Sunday, October 4. The festival, now in its 26th year, draws an estimated 750,000 total attendees over the three days and has never charged admission. Headliners this year include My Morning Jacket, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Old Crow Medicine Show…