Hey Brad, sorry for taking a few days to get back to you. First off - with all the qualified people on this forum - picking me out of the crowd was quite the compliment, so thank you.
I don't know the south bay as well but wanted to help quantify the "!@#@#$@!" hill so I did some looking at topographic maps. First of all, you can see the terrain southwest of the airport on the San Francisco TAC Chart on
skyvector.com, but I don't think you can link directly to it. Then I took a look at some USGS Topographic maps.
There is a wide northwest/southeast running ridge called
Montara Mountain 5 miles west through southwest of SFO at elevations just shy of 2000 ft - the highest point on which is
Scarpet Peak at 1944 ft. Additionally, there are several smaller sets of hills just west of San Andreas Lake - west of the 280 freeway, and only 3 to 4 miles from SFO - with elevations between 1200 ft and 1400 ft. They look like they'd have pretty damn good spotting potential for those up to possibly hiking on fire roads, and they're called
Sweeny Ridge and Fifield Ridge.
The Montara Mountain ridge line very effectively blocks the runway 1L/R extended runway centerlines, making straight in approaches from greater than 5 miles (the west side of the hills) extremely difficult for large passenger jet aircraft. Doing a little trigonometry, were you to try and make a straight in and (not legally) buzz 50 feet over the hill, your glide path would still be over 3.8 degrees, compared to the standard 3 degrees. Use a higher and more reasonable and legal altitude to clear the ridge, and you're looking at a glide slope of well over 4 degrees, which is why you never see them do it.
Instead, Norcal TRACON sequences them towards runway 28R (or left, but obviously not both) and they're cleared for a visual or ILS approach with instructions to circle to land runway 1R at the San Mateo Bridge. When handed off to SFO Tower, tower re-instructs them to circle south at the SFO 4 DME (the bridge) and enter right downwind runway 1R. Runway 1L seems to be available for landing on request. I haven't had a chance to listen to the latest archives yet, but I've attached a clip from January of last year I had sitting around my computer of SFO tower using circle to land runway 1R operations (edited for dead air). It also has a C206 landing on 1L from a LEFT base which is pretty non-standard. The full clip is 20 minutes and is full of lots of cool little things (coast guard helicopter departs IFR on the SFO8 DP, and lots of little "nice job" and "I wish I had a camera!" quotes) but I don't know how to post it here without exceeding the attachment size limits.
To address your runway configuration question Brad, SFO tower's choice in runway configurations is definitely based on Crosswind COMPONENTs (which have to be calculated using a graph or a handy online calculator like
this one) rather than fixed wind directions. This means, if the wind is from 340 at 10 kts and you're departing runway 28R, your crosswind component will be 9 knots from the right and 1 knot headwind, no sweat. Take this same wind direction now and bump the velocity up to 30 knots, and now you have a 26 knot crosswind from the right and a 15 knot headwind... and now you're getting dicier (though professional pilots do deal with much worse).
Short of calling SFO tower and asking them what their SOP says, I can't give you the exact magic numbers for when they'll change runway configurations - though I know they try to avoid using the 1s exclusively both because it cuts airport traffic capacity in half and because of the proximity of terrain to arrivals circling to land, so it only happens a couple of times a year when the winds are really strong from the north. Making an educated guess (which is sadly what we had to do on vatsim), in my clip the winds are 34022KT and in your example they're 36023G29KT, so 20 knots seems to be the likely number. Playing with the crosswind component computer at 20 knots and comparing a given wind direction to different runway headings at SFO, you eventually figure out that there's a wind direction where the crosswind is slightly less for one runway than the other - for instance a wind direction of 330 at 20 kts gives Rwy 28L/R a 15 knot crosswind from the right, while it gives Rwy 1L/R only a 13 knot crosswind from the left. But move to 320 degrees, and now Rwy 28L/R crosswind is 13 kts and Rwy 1L/R crosswind is 16 kts.
Therefore, I think in general we can reason that if the wind at SFO is between 330 degrees - 050 degrees and the wind velocity is greater than or equal to 20 knots, then runways 1L/R will be used for arrivals and departures or SFO Tower and Norcal TRACON will at least be evaluating that option.
I hope that was still helpful.
Inigo
EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that tower and the TMU at NCT will be evaluating other factors like surface analysis barometric pressure information and TAFs for forcast surface winds, which will ultimately play a large role in their decision to make the runway configuration change, and how long they're going to keep it (as it does when changing to southeast flow). In other words, if the wind velocity drops below a certain magic number for a limited amount of time, but it's forcast to continue from that direction and increase again, then it's impractical to change back to normal ops when the wind direction is still favoring the 1s anyway... if that makes any sense.
