A paddleboard rental at Santa Cruz Harbor on the California coast is preparing for the first warm and sunny weekend in a long time.
“I’m excited,” Trudie Ransom, owner of the SUP Shack, told The Epoch Times. “It could be the first best weekend we’ve had in six months.”
With temperatures expected to rise into the mid-70s beginning May 12 and through the weekend, her shop will be ready to rent surfboards and sell merchandise to beachgoers celebrating Mother’s Day weekend at one of the most popular beaches in the state.
The sunny skies will be a welcome change after a deluge of atmospheric river storms ravaged the central coast this winter. The state has been hit by 31 storms along its coastline since October.
“We’re all getting as back to normal as possible,” Ransom said. “We’ll be eager and ready to go.”
Thermometers could reach the 90s next week in parts of central California, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
“It will jump about 10 degrees by tomorrow,” Chelsea Peters, an NWS meteorologist in Sacramento, told The Epoch Times on May 11. “The real warming starts tomorrow and continues at least through the foreseeable future.”
Warmer temperatures will hang around the state on Saturday before leveling off through next week.
The NWS expects above-normal temperatures to remain in California for at least seven days. The Climate Prediction Center, which can forecast weather 14 days in advance, predicts temperatures to be in the upper-80s to low-90s in the Sacramento Valley through May 20, Peters said.
A ridge of high pressure is bringing temperatures up and is expected to stay for a while, she said.
Further south in the Los Angeles area, the weather service predicts temperatures at the beach to hover in the 70s and 80s, while downtown Los Angeles will reach 80 degrees on Saturday, according to Kristen Stewart, an NWS meteorologist in Los Angeles.
The valley should reach into the lower 90s starting Friday, Stewart said.
In southern California’s San Joaquin Valley, forecasters expect highs to be in the low 90s beginning Sunday, Jim Bagnall, a meteorologist with the NWS in Hanford, California, told The Epoch Times.
The area is under a heat advisory through Monday.
“We’re around 15 degrees above what we would normally expect,” Bagnall said.
The NWS is recommending that people take precautions for the heat, such as not overexerting themselves outside and staying hydrated.
“We just went through a period of below-normal temperatures, so it is a change from what we’ve been experiencing,” Bagnall said.
