[T]he month of September rolled in with a chill here on the Samoa Peninsula — one of the coldest places in California in these waning days of summer.
“We have our natural air conditioning here. If you can put up with a little morning fog and drizzle and overcast sky, it’s not too bad,” said Doug Boushey, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Eureka.
The Pacific Ocean has a moderating effect that Boushey calls a “cool, moist pump.”
When it is hot inland, that warm, thinner air rises in the atmosphere, and cold marine air is sucked in, like a vacuum, to fill the void, Boushey said. The warmer air aloft acts “like a lid,” trapping the heavier, cooler air, which can’t easily flow over mountains.
In Eureka, a mile east across the bay from the peninsula, the hottest temperature ever recorded is 87 degrees, Boushey said. The mercury hit that number in 1993, 2017, and 2020.
It’s a “wimpy record” as far as heat goes, he acknowledged.
With the heat dome firmly in place in parts elsewhere, the average highs around Eureka over the next week are in the mid-60s, Boushey said.
That’s even cooler than the famously frigid summer in a city five hours south: San Francisco. A high of around 79 is forecast there over Labor Day weekend.
While the overwhelming majority of U.S. cities have had shorter, hotter winters over the last 50 years because of climate change, Eureka is one of the very few to buck the trend, with its winters becoming slightly colder, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit research group.
Branson-Potts notes that the weather is a factor in the recent rise in Eureka;s housing costs, but clearly it is only one factor in a record-breaking 24% rise in prices over the prior year. As suggested by the Bloomberg piece, part of that was covid migration, when lots of folks looked to leave cities and find more space in "the country." That said, I know two families who not long ago moved to Eureka to avoid Central Valley heat. Plus, I assume the designation of Cal State Humboldt as the latest Cal Poly is also driving up demand. Indeed, that designation and anticipated accompanying growth also recently drove the university to pay well above market rate for a strategically located piece of property in neighboring Arcata.
Prior posts about this part of far northern California are here (including several from 2011, when a student in my Law and Rural Livelihoods class had grown up in Humboldt). As you'll gather from these, Humboldt County is part of the so-called Emerald Triangle, a notorious pot-growing region. But that part of the region's economy has suffered badly since marijuana cultivation was legalized--and came to be highly regulated.
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