Weather apps seemed to be thrown by our recent heat wave. Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
If you're like me, you were constantly refreshing the weather app on your phone this past week to see when temperatures would be lowering.
And if you're like me, you were dogged by growing horror as your app showed the heat wave extending longer and longer each time you opened it.
I'm being overly dramatic, of course, but it's true that no one really expected our most recent heat wave to drag out this long.
Early forecasts, including ones on Apple and Google, showed a two- to three-day period of high temperatures.
It reminded me of my worst experiences with PG&E outage notices, when they tell you power will be restored in two hours but then it changes to six just as the second hour is almost over.
Between the lines: It turns out our city's diverse microclimates can't always be accurately reflected in these forecasts, which "often overdo the cooling effect of the sea breeze" in San Francisco during extreme heat events, according to San Francisco Chronicle meteorologist Anthony Edwards.
The big picture: San Francisco endedup experiencing its third-hottest week in over 150 years, stretched over nine days.
Even the National Weather Service, which uses a system of blended weather models, predicted a too-early cooldown.
