Big Bay Area warm-up ahead after late spring rain
A parched Bay Area welcomed some late spring rainfall and muggy weather over the weekend, with North Bay areas seeing as much 2 inches of precipitation by Sunday morning, ahead of a warming week to come.
Temperatures will trend higher each day this week, forecasters said Sunday, with averages in the 60s on the coast to 80s inland. By Thursday and Friday, residents in the interior areas can expect temperatures in the 90s.
Downtown San Francisco’s rainfall was 0.2 inches as of Sunday, which is on par with the June average, said Ryan Walbrun, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
“It’s a warm system and above-normal area of moisture that worked its way across the Pacific,” Walbrun said of the rainfall, which was projected to wrap up by Sunday evening. Getting rain in June is not completely out of the ordinary, he said, “but we also have Junes where we don’t get rain, of course.”
It’s been a while. The last time the area saw rain in June was in 2017, he said.
The Mount Tamalpais area in Marin County saw an accumulated 2 inches of rain by Sunday morning, and 1.5 inches fell in parts of west Sonoma County and coastal Marin, Walbrun said.
The North Bay had higher totals, with 0.69 inches reported at Sonoma County Airport, while the wettest spots in the East Bay hills received 0.3 inches, according to Walbrun. The National Weather Service’s Bay Area precipitation map showed 0.16 inches at Oakland International Airport and only 0.01 inches at San Jose’s airport as of Sunday morning.
The rain arrived on a “warm moist air mass coming across the Pacific” that brought a noticeable mugginess to the region.
As to the ongoing drought and upcoming wildfire season, Walbrun said this little bit of rain “in the grand scheme of things, it will not really impact” that multiyear event.
Nonetheless, he said, “Beggars can’t be choosers, and we will take what we can get.”
He said the rain up in the North Bay mountains will be enough to “lower the fire danger for at least a few days,” which is good news ahead of the temperatures that will rise later this week. But the paltry rainfall in the South Bay will not make much impact, he added.