Climate reading

San Francisco and the Chinese solar calendar

In San Francisco, the typical year has no freeze at all, so the calendar's frost season hardly applies. In the years that get one, it typically arrives around December 31, and it's over by January 1. Where the calendar and your weather disagree, go by your weather.

The weather station behind this page

Official NOAA averages for 1991–2020 at this station: a typical year, not a forecast.

Rain and heat across the whole year

Here the rainy weeks tend to be the cooler weeks, the reverse of where the calendar comes from, so its advice for muggy, hot-and-wet weather doesn't fit San Francisco. On a scale from −1 (opposite) to 1 (perfectly together), San Francisco scores -0.96 and the calendar's home region 0.88.

Where the calendar is most wrong about San Francisco

These four two-week stretches are where the calendar's names or advice sit furthest from San Francisco's thirty-year record.

All twenty-four two-week stretches in San Francisco

‘vs. calendar’ is how much warmer (+) or cooler (−) each stretch runs here than where the calendar comes from. Rain figures count rainy days, not inches.

The body-type notes follow traditional Chinese medicine as set out in a national standard in China. Tying them to this city's weather is a traditional association, not a finding from modern research. Which type goes with which stretch is our own arrangement: each is matched to the time of year the standard says it finds hard, or, for rain, to the rainiest of the four when it's wetter than San Francisco's year as a whole. Weather doesn't decide anyone's body type. To find yours, take the assessment.

Find out your body type

Twenty-six questions, about three minutes, no account needed.

Take the 26-question assessment

How San Francisco compares with the other thirteen

San Francisco has 365 frost-free days a year, the most of the fourteen, tied with Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix. That's 214 more than Denver, which has the fewest.

Rain falls on 18.2% of days here over a year. Phoenix is the driest of the fourteen at 9.2% and Seattle the wettest at 43.1%, which puts San Francisco at the dry end.

The hottest two weeks here are White Dew, with an average high of 74.9°F and rain on 3.1% of days: never especially hot. 13 of the fourteen get hotter at their peak, Phoenix among them.

The other thirteen cities

• Atlanta
• Boston
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Denver
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• Minneapolis
• New York
• Phoenix
• Seattle
• Washington DC

All fourteen cities side by side

Where this comes from

The thirty-year averages are NOAA's official 1991–2020 figures, one station per city, read straight from NOAA's records by our own program. Freezing days for each two-week stretch are estimated from NOAA's monthly counts. Figures for where the calendar comes from are based on weather-station measurements and reanalysis data from the Yellow River valley in northern China, where the calendar's names come from. The seasonal advice comes from the Su Wen, in our own translation.

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