Weather in Riverside in March

Prime time. If you get to pick your dates, March is the one. Highs average 23.5 °C, lows 9.5 °C, and rain falls on 5 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

March ranks 3 of 12 in Riverside. Only April scores clearly higher, and the difference is small enough to be settled by price rather than weather.

Rain falls on only 5 days, so an itinerary with no wet-weather fallback is a reasonable risk. Nothing specialised needed — this is the month you pack for the trip rather than for the weather.

What the averages hide

The averages here are honest — no hidden extremes worth planning around. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest March day reached 35.1 °C and the coldest night fell to 1.2 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 43 mm — roughly 134% of the month's rain in one day.

This is the volatile part. March rainfall has ranged from 4 mm to 102 mm across the twenty years measured — a 98 mm spread around an average of 32 mm. The average is real but almost no individual March looks like it, so treat the figure as the middle of a wide range rather than a forecast.

Wind is light at 6.6 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity is unremarkable at 59%.

How March sits in the year

The month is on the way up: 2.7 °C warmer than February, and April adds another 2.1 °C. Late in the month feels noticeably different from the start of it, which is worth knowing if the trip is short.

Daylight in March

11.9 hours of daylight, gaining 1.1 hours across the month. That is between Riverside's extremes of 14.4 and 9.9 hours, so days are long enough not to constrain the plan.

An inland climate

With no coast nearby, the year swings a fair way — 29.5 °C between the warmest afternoons and the coldest nights, wider than any coastal city at this latitude would manage. Within March itself the daily swing is 14 °C, so mornings and afternoons need different clothes.

How busy it gets

Peak season. Expect the highest prices of the year and to be booking well ahead.

Crowd levels are estimated from climate desirability and school-holiday calendars, not from visitor numbers.

March in Riverside versus nearby

If Riverside is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Irvine is the weaker option in March — 6.1 °C cooler, the same number of rain days. Los Angeles is close enough to be a coin toss — within a degree on temperature, the same number of rain days.

So: March is effectively as good as it gets here — 3 points behind April, which is inside the margin where the weather stops being the deciding factor and price starts being it.

Every month in Riverside

See all twelve months in Riverside, or where else to go in March.