Jason Kraling sank his fingers deep into the spongy soil on Mount Laguna Saturday and pulled out a fistful of dead leaves, brittle pine needles, shards of wood and rich brown soil.
“Look at how moist this is,” said Kraling, a fire battalion chief with the U.S. Forest Service. “We’ve gotten a reprieve from how dry things were last summer. It’s a good time for prescribed burns.”
Another winter blast is headed to San Diego County with significant rain and snow anticipated starting Wednesday morning.
A winter weather advisory has been issued for the mountain areas until 4 p.m. Wednesday and according to San Diego’s National Weather Service the expected snow will be heavy and wet. Travel in those areas is likely to be difficult to impossible. Drivers were advised to use extra caution.
After more than a year of well-below average water levels at Folsom Lake, the Bureau of Reclamation will start making releases from that reservoir early Tuesday morning.
The releases are necessary because the water level is now near the maximum allowed at this time of year for flood protection. Inflows in the last few weeks have driven the lake up to a near 425 feet, which is as high as the Bureau of Reclamation would like to have it at this time of year.
A cold, wet holiday season will continue this week with two winter storms hitting Southern California and Northern California grappling with heavy accumulations of snow and rockslides that have closed off the Tahoe area. The first Southern California storm arrived in the Los Angeles region Monday afternoon, with a second storm expected Tuesday night that could linger into Friday morning.
A one-two punch of storm systems is expected to drape the Bay Area in rainy weather for much of the upcoming week while potentially making holiday travel in the Sierra Nevada mountains “very challenging to impossible,” meteorologists say.
A robust atmospheric river storm started to taper off Tuesday morning in the Bay Area after shuttering highways due to flooding and prompting evacuation warnings in areas left scarred by wildfires and susceptible to mudslides and debris flows.
A major winter storm hitting Northern California with rain and snow was expected to intensify Monday and bring travel headaches and the threat of localized flooding after an especially warm and dry fall in the U.S. West.
Light rain and snow that began falling on Sunday got heavier overnight. The multiday storm could dump more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) of snow on the highest peaks in California and Nevada and drench other parts of the states as it pushes south and east before moving out midweek.
Every time it rains, Angelenos might be thinking: are we saving any of that rain water?
Thursday’s storm brought some much needed rainfall, but with a burgeoning drought, many Southern California residents are wondering if we benefitted at all.
San Diego County got some precipitation Tuesday morning, and more rain is expected Thursday. But it’s a drop in the bucket since the county’s last storm in October.
National Weather Service meteorologist Alex Tardy said San Diego County is expected to receive .01 to .05 inches of rain Tuesday, and heavier rainfall, approximately .25 to .50 inches, on Thursday over Valley Center and Alpine.
“There will be no major storm. We can expect Pacific storms to bring in colder weather, which will replace the dry air and reduce fuel weather (fires),” he said.
With just hours left to go in this month — and no precipitation in the forecast for Tuesday — downtown Los Angeles is set to experience its first rainless November in almost 30 years, according to the National Weather Service.
The 11th month of the year is typically not a wet one for the area, with downtown’s average just a hair above three-quarters of an inch on average, NWS said.
However, it’s still unusual for there to be no precipitation at all. In fact, that hasn’t happened since 1992, weather service data showed.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
