THE WEATHER BEAT · SEP 17

Santa Barbara's hottest day on record is a September day in 1913

On September 17, 1913 the Santa Barbara gauge read 108.0 degrees. In a record running 1893 to 2026, nothing has topped it.

By the Weather Rock September 17, 2026, 7:59 a.m. · 3 min read

GOES satellite view of the event region — The southern California coast and the Santa Barbara Channel in the late afternoon, the shelf of coast the 1913 gauge sat on. Image: NOAA GOES-West GeoColor via NASA GIBS, 2026-09-17 00:00Z.

No NOAA page carries a citable cause, so the story runs on the archive's own lines only. The queue is empty and no trigger in the constitution holds on the wire. History desk.

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Key points

The hottest day in Santa Barbara's record book is September 17, 1913, when the town gauge read 108.0 degrees.
The archive behind our town pages runs that station from 1893 to 2026, and nothing in those years has topped it.
Our archive holds 215 record days for this four day stretch of the calendar, 64 of them on September 17 alone.

The day the coast read 108

The hottest day Santa Barbara has on file is not in July. It is not in August. It is the middle of September.

On September 17, 1913, the Santa Barbara gauge, station USC00047902, read 108.0 degrees. The record behind our town pages runs that station from 1893 to 2026. In all of those years, through every summer anyone alive has sat through, no day has come in higher. The number has stood for 113 Septembers.

That is a strange reading for the place. Santa Barbara is a coastal town, and coastal towns are supposed to be the ones that stay cool while the valleys cook. Something turned that arrangement around for a day.

Here is where the rock stops. Our archive records what the thermometer did. It does not record why. There is no NOAA or Weather Service page this desk could pull tonight that explains the 1913 reading, so no explanation appears here. The number is verified. The cause is not ours to offer.

One gauge does a lot of work on that stretch of coast. The same station is the nearest record for six of our towns, from Santa Barbara itself out to Carpinteria about eleven miles down the shore, which means 108.0 is the standing figure on all six town pages rather than six separate measurements. It is one day, told six times.

It is worth knowing that mid September is busier in the record book than most people would guess. Counting today and the three days after it, our archive turns up 215 record days somewhere in the country. September 17 carries 64 of them by itself, from a 105.1 degree afternoon in Granite Falls, Minnesota in 1895 to a run of Puerto Rico rainfall records in 1975. Late summer does not end politely.

The record, for the nerds

item	value
Record	Hottest day
Value	108.0 F
Date	September 17, 1913
Station	Santa Barbara, USC00047902
Record span	1893 to 2026
Towns this gauge speaks for	6

town	distance from gauge
Santa Barbara CA	1.9 mi
Montecito CA	2.9 mi
Mission Canyon CA	3.3 mi
Summerland CA	5.5 mi
Toro Canyon CA	7.1 mi
Carpinteria CA	10.7 mi

Source: the house NOAA station archive, read by beat-history.py on 2026-09-15. Every figure above is a line that tool printed. No figure here comes from anywhere else.

This is a historical summary, not emergency information. For live warnings see weather.gov and your local officials.

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The rock's live forecast for the places in this story