Sacramento temperature blanket 2024: After a hot start to October, Sacramento finally sees chillier temperatures

In my last update on our temperature blanket, I said I was looking forward to some fall weather. But actually getting there took a little longer than expected. At the start of October, we saw hotter temperatures than usual for this time of year and several record-breaking daily highs. 

We’re creating a Sacramento temperature blanket. Here’s why (and what that is)

On Oct. 7, the Sacramento Executive Airport saw a record-breaking high temperature of 101 degrees. That’s 18 degrees higher than the average for that day. 

“In addition to that, we had a record on Oct. 3, on the fifth, the sixth … so we set several daily records, which is pretty unusual,” Eric Kurth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento, told me. 

Now, temperatures are finally cooling down. We’ve seen some rain in the Sacramento region and alongside that, cooling weekly averages in our temperature blanket. We started the month with celery-colored squares, representing averages in the 70s, and we’re finally back to seafoam-colored squares, which represent averages in the 60s. 

But one piece of summer is still with us: Fire season. Kurth says experts typically wait for a big precipitation event before saying California’s peak fire season is behind us. That typically comes sometime in late October or November, sometimes in the form of an atmospheric river. 

While we haven’t seen an event like that just yet, cooler temperatures have allowed us to enter into a different kind of season. We’re now entering the window of time where we can more safely conduct prescribed burns, which is a forest management technique that clears out excess vegetation growth and reduces the risk of severe wildfires. 

I talked to Joshua Mott, a spokesperson with CalFire, who told me the season for prescribed burns depends on what part of California you live in. Generally speaking, however, the season begins in the fall and can last until early spring. But classifying certain parts of the year as fire season — or not — can be tricky.

“Unfortunately, the way that California is, we’re seeing ourselves more in a wildfire year than necessarily seasonalities of peak and low peak,” he says. “We can have wildfires appear any time of year.” 

CalFire’s goal for prescribed burning is 50,000 acres a year. It’s an ambitious plan that can be difficult to accomplish during extremely wet winters when conditions aren’t optimal for burning. So far this year, Mott told me they’ve treated 3,756 acres with prescribed fire — and they’re just getting started.