Summer Mean Diurnal Water and Air Temperature Distributions in the Cape Mendocino area, California

Abstract

This study is concerned with the spatial analysis of the mean air and water temperature distributions recorded at sampling sites located throughout the Cape Mendocino area of northern California. Employing a three hour sampling interval, it was found that the basic northerly air flow in summer was quite important to the resulting distributions of air temperatures computed for each individual site. Furthermore, elevation and distance from the coastline were also quite important to the resulting air temperature distributions. However, the mean water temperatures examined were slightly modified, if any, by the diurnal heating cycle.