Hot Weather Sweeps Through the County

Unseasonably warm temperatures in Thousand Oaks and the rest of Ventura County on Tuesday sent some residents searching for something cool.

“We’ve been packed for the past two days,” said Jennifer Alvarez, a clerk at Baskin-Robbins 31 ice cream store in Thousand Oaks. “Whenever the temperature goes up, people just start thinking ‘ice cream.’ ”

The sunny, hot weather is expected to linger today, with highs in the 80s for most parts of the county, said Nick Leivers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. But a cooling trend will start tonight, when a thick marine layer descends over coastal areas during the night and morning.

Leivers said it reached 86 degrees in Thousand Oaks on Tuesday. Even normally cool Point Mugu reached 80 degrees by 1 p.m., Leivers said.

“We were a little surprised by how hot it got ourselves,” he said.

“Instead of a normal sea breeze keeping things cool, the winds have been limited to the immediate beach areas,” he said. “The rest of us are getting what the valleys usually get.”

Temperatures were expected to cool by seven or eight degrees inland to the upper 70s to low 80s and drop by about four degrees to the mid-60s along the coast.