Wet weather: More storms headed for soggy Bay Area
A pair of big storms are expected to roll across the Bay Area Sunday and Monday, boosting the region’s rainfall to abnormally high October levels.
On-and-off showers dampened the region Saturday in a prelude to the heavier rain.
The wet weather has pushed rainfall totals in the Bay Area to exceptionally high levels, with many places recording between 200 and 400 percent of normal precipitation for the month.
The first storm — which was expected to begin Saturday night and last through Sunday morning — brought with it a chance of thunder and lightning, said Anna Schneider, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Meanwhile, low-hanging clouds Saturday morning caused delays of up to an hour and a half at San Francisco International Airport, which put in place a ground-delay program because of the weather.
Saturday’s cloud cover coupled with a tropical air mass explained another weather peculiarity — extremely high low temperatures. The usual lows would typically be about 10 to 20 degrees cooler for this time of year, according to the weather service. A low of 61 Saturday for San Francisco broke the record for the date’s highest low temperature, which was set in 1983 when the low was 60.
For the Tahoe area, the warm wet weather put a damper on the optimistic opening day for the Mount Rose resort, which had been hoping for powder Friday but got rain.
On Sunday, though, the Sierra is expected to get between 6 and 12 inches of snow above 7,000 feet and as many as 18 inches on the mountain crests. About 2 inches may accumulate at lake level, too, said Mark Deutschendorf, a weather service meteorologist.
“I’m sure they’ll be awaiting the result of this event,” he said about the ski resorts. “We’ll just have to stay tuned.”
The snowfall, especially during its peak Sunday afternoon, will heavily impact traffic over the passes, Deutschendorf said.
With still a couple of days left in October, cities were already seeing sky-high rain totals for the month, especially in the North Bay. Napa’s 3.11 inches of rain was 375 percent of normal, and Santa Rosa’s 5.74 inches was 338 percent of normal. SFO recorded 2.21 inches — 280 percent of its normal rainfall for the month.
The wet start to the rain season marginally helped California’s reservoirs. Though two-thirds of them were not close to their historical averages of fullness, they were doing far better than they had been during the last several drought years.
Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in the state, was 101 percent of normal on Friday — the highest it’s been at this time of year since 2011.