finalflame
Banned
Average monthly March rainfall in SF is about ~3-4" total, so getting this amount in 10 days is a fair bit .
I guess in the context of a drought-stricken area, sure. I just need to brave up and move to Seattle already
Average monthly March rainfall in SF is about ~3-4" total, so getting this amount in 10 days is a fair bit .
Been raining pretty consistently in my area the last 2 days, pretty hard downpours at times.
Rain supposed to hit SoCal tomorrow I think, predictions are for a seven-day total around 20 inches of rain in NorCal and up to 3 inches in SoCal.
Yep, Bay Area is getting pummeled. >_<
"pummeled" = more than an inch of nonstop rain. I'm loving it, personally, but doesn't compare to the storms back out east at least down here in the South Bay.
Punishing weekend rains that brought down scores of trees and knocked out power to thousands around the Bay Area turned to scattered showers for the Monday morning commute, but forecasters warn of more storms on the way.
By the afternoon, rain and isolated thunderstorms will taper off and things will dry out. Another round of rain, though, is on track to hit the region in the second half of the week, forecasters said.
More than an inch of rain fell overnight at San Francisco International Airport in the second of back-to-back downpours that drenched the entire region.
Downtown San Francisco ended up with 2.37 inches of weekend rainfall, and across the bay in Orinda, 6.26 inches came down during the same period, according to the National Weather Service.
In Fremont, roughly 4 inches fell and parts of Marin got nearly 7 inches of rain over the weekend.
The rain-fall winner, though, was in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties were some spots got more than 10 inches over the 72-hour period.
Roadways around the region flooded and falling debris made for dangerous driving conditions late Sunday. Down trees blocked Highway 92 in both directions in Half Moon Bay around midnight. That debris was cleared early Monday.
The California Highway Patrol reported flooding on roadways in San Francisco, Oakland, Marin, San Jose, and Redwood City with some areas under more than a foot of water during the beginning of the morning commute.
The CHP issued a wind advisory for the Bay Bridge where gusts were whipping at 50 mph.
Sundays storm was slightly weaker than a soaking system that socked the Bay Area on Saturday night.
That system knocked out power to thousands of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers and crews scrambled throughout the weekend to restore power. Power was back on Monday to the more than 50,000 people affected by the weekend outages as skies began to clear around the area.
Things will dry out through the middle of the week until showers return on Thursday, said Diana Henderson, a weather service forecaster. Then Saturday will be dry before more rain comes on Sunday.
A seven-day total could approach 20 inches of rain in Northern California and up to three inches in the southern end of the state, where rain is expected to arrive Sunday.
Farther north, a 48-hour winter storm warning went into effect in the state's far northwestern and central areas as well as the Sierra Nevada, where snow totals could range from 2 feet to 4 feet at elevations above 8,000 feet. Sierra snow levels will lower to near 4,000 feet by Sunday, forecasters said.
The Sierra snowpack, which normally stores about 30 percent of California's water supply, was only 83 percent of the March 1 average when it was measured earlier this week. That's much better than a year earlier, but after years of drought nearly all the state's major reservoirs hold far less water than average by this time of year, the Department of Water Resources said.
Starting on Monday and continuing into the rest of next week, ample moisture will be pulled in from the Gulf of Mexico ahead of a slow moving cold front, leading to days of rain for a large swath of the central and southern U.S., stretching from the central Gulf Coast up through to the Ohio Valley.
Heavy rainfall and flooding are possible throughout Oklahoma as a storm system makes its way through the state, with the strongest storms capable of producing large hail and damaging wind gusts, forecasters said.
The greatest threat for the heaviest accumulations of rain are northeast Texas into Arkansas and Louisiana and other parts of the lower or middle Mississippi River Valley, where five-day rain rainfall totals could exceed or 7 or 8 inches.
The first of a pair of storms pounded Northern California on Thursday, bringing heavy bands of rain to the North Bay, causing minor flooding and mudslides, and raising the specter that the flood-prone Russian River might spill its banks.
The National Weather Services hazardous outlook remained in place for the most of the Bay Area as on-and-off downpours were forecast to continue Friday. Parts of Sonoma and Napa counties were expecting as much 4 inches of rain by Friday evening, igniting fear that a region thirsty for rain might get too much too fast.
The Russian River, with its long history of surging into streets and homes in the redwood-covered towns west of Santa Rosa, was expected to hit flood stage in Guerneville at 11 p.m Friday. River levels were expected to top out Saturday morning just shy of 3 feet above the 32-foot flood level, forecasters said a cause for some worry but probably not enough of a deluge to cause major problems.
Well upstream, water managers released supplies at Lake Sonoma earlier this week for the first time in five years to prevent the reservoir from filling up and having to discharge water when the storms arrive.
The Napa River in St. Helena was also projected to run slightly above flood stage Friday, peaking at around 3 p.m., according to the weather service. Navarro Creek in Mendocino County was expected to swell even higher above its banks between Friday morning and Sunday morning, but the rural waterway is far enough away from most homes as to not cause big problems.
The surging rivers are the result of an atmospheric river off the Pacific Ocean that forecasters say will keep parts of Northern California mostly wet through Monday. The North Bay is likely to bear the brunt of the system.
By Thursday afternoon, Santa Rosa had recorded 2.1 inches of rain, Point Reyes Station 1.3 inches and Napa an inch. The hilly Sonoma County community of Venado had already logged 3.7 inches. The storm arrived later in San Francisco, dropping just 0.2 inches of rain by Thursday afternoon. The city was expected to pick up 1.5 inches through Friday.
Conditions were forecast to mostly dry out by Saturday morning, according to the weather service, with a chance of showers on Saturday before another storm moves in Sunday.
Since March 2, Shasta Lake has received 6.44 inches of rain, and another 10 could fall between Thursday and Tuesday.
"The system is rising and we hope to capture as much of this runoff as possible, but it's hard to know whether it will fill up right now," Moore said. "It's looking good. We're getting close..."
Close ... but still far away.
Shasta registered its lowest level ever, 837 feet above sea level, in 1977. In December 2014, the lake dipped down to 889 feet. But the recent storms are replenishing the lake, and the elevation on March 9 hit 1,012 feet. In the last month, the reservoir has risen 28 feet and it needs to go up another 55 feet to 1,067 feet above sea level to reach full capacity. That's a lot of rain that needs to fall and snow that needs to melt for the reservoir to fill by month's end.
The early March deluge is arriving just in time across the Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada and throughout Northern California.
Across the board, the effects are immediate, and more rain and snow are on the way. Reports from near and far indicate that outdoor recreation will benefit for months to come. This comes just as the state was drying out.
The water level at Loch Lomond Reservoir, which had been closed for the past three years, rose so fast that the lake, near Ben Lomond in Santa Cruz County, was reopened for the weekend. According to estimates Sunday, the lake was about 85 percent full and climbing.
We got so much water last night, the docks are underwater and most of the boats almost sank, said Jackson Branham, who works at the small marina at Loch Lomond.
In a 24-hour span, Ben Lomond (near the lake) got 5.64 inches of rain, and 4.44 inches fell at Boulder Creek, according to automated gauges. In nearby Big Basin Redwoods, all the waterfalls have been recharged, though trees downed in the storm are likely to provide obstacles on some remote trails.
A state roads worker was given quite a scare Friday after he was dispatched to clear a mudslide on Highway 1 in Mendocino County and a second slide toppled his dump truck.
The unexpected wall of mud poured down a rural hillside around 3 a.m., pushing the truck and its lone occupant on its side against a guardrail, leaving the employee fortunately without injury, according to the California Department of Transportation.
He was able to climb out of the truck afterward, unharmed, just very shaken up, said Caltrans spokesman Phil Frisbie, Jr. On the other side of that guardrail, it is a very steep slope to the beach.
The rugged stretch of Highway 1 about five miles north of Westport remained closed Friday afternoon while state geologists evaluated how the landslide might be cleaned up. The dump truck was still stuck in the mud.
The truck driver was with a maintenance fleet out of Fort Bragg responding to a different slide in the same area when the mud flow struck.