Rain will make a rare appearance in parts of the Bay Area today

Cold front will dissipate quickly, and forecasters say weekend will be dry

Raincoats can be be removed from storage and likely will be put to use today, according to the National Weather Service.

Still, if you forget you r s , you may not end up getting soaked, weather forecasters said.

“T his is going to be only a quick hitter,” meteorologist Roger Gass sa id T hu r sd ay a f t ernoon. “T his cold front is not very strong, and when it shif ts out of the Monterey Bay region, it’ll fall apart and weaken pretty fast. By Friday night, it’ll be dry again.”

It has been mostly dry all year, but a brief respite from those conditions was expected in the North Bay and Coastal mountain areas, where forecasters anticipated as much as half an inch of rain early today. The rain will be courtesy of a cold front that has developed within a trough along the West Coast, cooling temperatures over the past week, forecasters said.

The front is expected to migrate south through areas such as Oakland, Concord and San Francisco by the afternoon, Gass said. It likely will just graze the South Bay and areas such as San Jose, Gass said.

“In those places, they may get less than onetenth of an inch,” he said.

Any amount of rain this year qualifies as unusua l. R a in t ot a ls throughout the state are dow n any where f rom 25% to 40% this year, according to forecasters. Instead, California has dealt with dry conditions that have led to massive wildfires throughout the state.

“Even though we’re lacking, a lot of heav y rainfall wou ld n’ t be good for the burned areas,” Gass said. “Getting a little here and a little there is much better because that can prevent the mudslides and other issues that come from having heav y rains so shortly after vegetation has been burned.”

Such a concern won’t be arr iv ing any time soon, Gass said. High pressure will begin to build along the West Coast starting Sunday as a trough that has trapped cold air throughout the West Coast starts to break up.

“It’ll be back to the same pattern we’ve been seeing,” he said. “High pressure and dry conditions.”