This week could be The City’s hottest this year

San Franciscans are bracing for potentially the hottest stretch of the year with scorching temperatures set to boil a large swath of the West Coast this week.

Temperatures will rise into the 80s in some parts of The City as early as Tuesday, which would approach San Francisco’s hottest day of the year so far, National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Gass said. The forecast temperatures would not break historical records.

Downtown San Francisco — generally the warmest section of The City — is forecast to reach as high as the low 80s on Tuesday, Gass said. San Francisco’s coastal areas, cooled by the marine layer, will sit in the mid-to-upper 60s.

Though temperatures are expected to peak Tuesday, the mercury will stay elevated Wednesday before dropping the rest of the week, especially on the shoreline.

Gass said this warm-up is going to be “comparable” to a hot stretch last month, leaving open that it could even be “slightly warmer.”

“This is just a brief high pressure building over the region coming in from the Pacific, and it's just just one minor blip in temperatures,” Gass said.

It remains to be seen how severe summer weather will be in the Bay Area this year. Generally, the hottest period of the year is from July through September, though recently temperatures have skyrocketed as late as October, as was the case during a historically hot span last year.

Gass said this week’s flare-up isn’t “abnormal” for June. He added that this incoming heat event likely won’t create much fire risk in the Bay Area, because most of the air will be coming from onshore flow, which originates from the ocean and carries more moisture. Offshore flow, on the other hand, which comes from the east and is far drier, reduces humidity levels.

“We could see some small grass fires get started, but that would be it at most,” Gass said. “As far as the larger fire season as a whole, this heat event really isn't any indication of what we can expect for the fire season.”

Scott Stephens, professor of fire science at UC Berkeley, told The Examiner last month that wildfire conditions across Northern California have been relatively mild this year due to abnormally late rains lasting into May, though he said the rest of the wildfire season will largely depend upon how hot the summer is.

The National Weather Service doesn’t plan to issue any heat advisories for The City, though it has for the inland North and East Bay from Tuesday to Thursday, and for the South Bay Wednesday and Thursday. High temperatures could potentially climb to the low 100s in some locations.

The oncoming warm up is part of a potentially record-breaking heat dome — a weather phenomenon trapping extreme heat in a large geographical area — on track to scorch parts of California, Arizona, and southern Nevada. An excessive heat warning is in effect for more than 10 million people in California.