It’s a little after midnight on February 6. We just walked home from downtown Berkeley with our friends Piero and Jill. It’s warm out. The entirely unofficial reading at our house is 65.1 degrees–up a fraction of a degree in the last half-hour. A UC-Berkeley weather station downtown records 67.8 right now, and most temperatures in the area right now are in the mid 60s up to 70.
The record high for this date in Berkeley, according to data from the Western Regional Climate Centter, is 71, set in 1987. The record high minimum–the highest low for this date–is 55, set in 1963. Hard to judge where we’ll wind up at dawn, but I’d say we have a good shot of setting a new “highest low” record.
Our average high and low for the 6th of February: 59 and 45.
Update (1:30 p.m.): The overnight low at UC-Berkeley’s downtown weather station was 63.6 degrees, recorded at 8:17 a.m. The official station is on campus near McCone Hall, but even given the fact the downtown location appears to be in a warmer spot than the official one, it’s safe to bet the all-time “highest low” record was broken this morning. And high temperature records for the date are being rewritten everywhere around the bay, too. Here’s a map (from the University of Utah’s MesoWest service) and a record summary (from the National Weather Service in Monterey).