Super Bowl Will Be Hottest On Record (UPDATE: Record Highs Set Further North, Too!)

A rare wintertime heat advisory is in effect this week around
Los Angeles, and Sunday's Super Bowl will be feature
the hottest temperatures of any for the big game.

Sunday's Super Bowl, featuring the Los Angeles Rams versus the Cincinnati Bengals, will be the hottest  Super Bowl on record. 

Sure, it's a premier winter event, but temperatures during the game will kick off in Los Angeles at 3:30 p.m. West Coast time, when temperatures are expecting to be in the upper 80s. 

The Los Angeles area is under a very rare (at least for this time of year) heat advisory through Sunday.  High temperatures in the region are forecast to range between 86 and 91 degrees over the next few days. 

As the Washington Post reports: 

"For the first time in California's history, the National Weather Service has issued heat advisories in February affecting more than 16 million people. Until this point, such advisories had occurred only between April and October."

High temperatures in downtown Los Angeles daily today through Sunday should be somewhere between 87 and 89 degrees.

This isn't the hottest it's ever been around Los Angeles this time of year, but it's up there. The all time hottest temperature in the city's downtown during February was 95 degrees in 1995.

Since these temperatures are unusually hot, but not entirely unprecedented, I do have questions as to why the National Weather Service office in Los Angeles pulled the trigger on a heat advisory.

That doesn't mean I oppose the idea. Temperatures in the upper 80s, especially considering the humidity won't be that bad, doesn't sound too awful. But if you're not acclimatized to that kind of weather, you can get yourself in trouble, especially if you don't drink enough (non-alcoholic) liquid.

I haven't seen any public announcements of the reasoning behind the heat advisory, but I can think of a couple good ones.

First of all, this is a long stretch of hot weather. Each day, starting Wednesday and forecast to continue through Sunday, will be 15 to 20 degrees warmer than average.  The longer a hot spell goes on, the more it affects people.

So this will tend to wear down people who must work outdoors.  

Perhaps an even bigger issue is the Super Bowl itself. Los Angeles will host a crap load of out of towners, many of whom are really not accustomed to summer hot spells in February.

Many of the people at the game will surely be from the Cincinnati area. Normal high temperatures in that part of the nation this time of year are in the low 40s. 

They won't be used to the heat, and half of them will be drinking tons of beer.

The heat is being accompanied by gusty downslope winds. Since December, the Los Angeles area has not seen the normal winter rains it should get. Early Thursday, a rare February brush fire forced evacuations around Laguna Beach, California.  As of mid-day, firefighters seemed to be gaining the upper hand on the fire. 

Further north, several daily record highs were set Thursday around the San Francisco Bay Area.  The San Francisco Airports reached 78 degrees, breaking the record for the hottest reading for the entire month of February.  Salinas tied its all-time February record, reaching 87 degrees.

Downslope winds in Oregon had temperatures in that state reaching 85 in the town of Brookings. This might be a February record for the entire state of Oregon.

More record highs are expected along the West Coast today into Sunday.