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.
Residents across the western United States who have drought relief on their holiday wish lists this season will be in luck over the next week. A series of storms will take aim at the West Coast and deliver needed rain and mountain snow from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest through Christmas Day.
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.
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.
Two Southern California ski areas will open this week despite dry fall weather.
Big Bear Mountain Resorts announced that Friday will be opening day for the general public at Bear Mountain and Snow Summit. Season pass holders will get an early start on Thursday.
Weather across Southern California has been dry and mild but it has been cold enough up in the San Bernardino Mountains for snowmaking.
Don’t hold your breath for California’s drought ending with this winter’s rains. Instead, you’d do well to hold your shower time to a minimum.
There’s less than a 40% chance of water supplies getting back to normal after this winter, with a slightly better than 50% chance that the state’s drought will worsen, according to forecasters at a Monday, Nov. 22, drought webinar hosted by the National Integrated Drought Information Center. The center is led by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
You may have seen it on social media or heard it while talking to a friend: This is a La Niña year, so California won’t get any rain this winter and the severe drought is only going to get worse. Right?
Maybe not. Although that’s a common belief, it’s not supported by past history. The reality is that a lot depends on where you live.
October storms helped this winter’s rainy season get off to a good start across Northern California. But they weren’t enough to erase the two very dry previous years: 80% of California remains in an extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly federal report.
Reservoir levels are very low and groundwater tables are depleted because the past two years had the least rainfall in Northern California of any two-year period since 1976-77.
For California, the arrival of winter means the beginning of our rainy season, at least relatively speaking.
However much precipitation California is going to receive in a year, the bulk of it typically falls between December and March. And given the severity of our state’s ongoing drought, the amount of rain we get this winter couldn’t be of more importance.
Faced with a worsening drought and the ever-present threat of more wildfires, the Bay Area needed a miracle. And last month, it got one. An unexpected and almost unprecedented October deluge gave the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, the primary water supply for San Francisco and most of the Bay Area, a more than 21-foot bump in its water level. That’s an 11% boost; and the prospect of breaking the drought this rainy season suddenly no longer sounds impossible.
