The San Francisco Bay Area is blessed by being one of only a few regions around the world described as experiencing a Mediterranean climate. The weather is determined, in part, by the oceans, in California’s case, by a high-pressure cell called the North Pacific High, with a secondary effect of desert creation, in our case, the Sonoran Desert surrounding Los Angeles. (And here we could have a lesson on California’s aqueducts, no less an engineering feat than Rome’s, and without which Los Angeles couldn’t last what, a week?)
Closer to home, all this translates to cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers—a heat mitigated by what I call the Bay Area’s natural air conditioning: fog drawn off the Pacific and pulled inland by the waters of the Bay—it comes in on those “little cat feet” right under the Golden Gate Bridge—famously cooling San Francisco and the Peninsula down to approximately San Mateo. Cooling, yes—and cutting off the sun! Towns below San Mateo are towns below the fog line: we get the cooling and the sun. Buy a house in Pacifica, just south of the City, and you spend months under fog. Buy in Redwood City, you can see the fog clinging to the ridge—while basking yourself in softened summer sun. Buy in south San Jose, you can watch the thermometer reach a hundred and higher—no natural air conditioning, too far from the fog.
