The newest storm slated to hit the Bay Area has slowed in its pace considerably and is not going to produce as much rain as the National Weather Service originally anticipated.
Nor is it going to open the gate to a new conveyor belt of rainy weather.
“Basically, over the past five days, it has slowed down probably by about 18 hours,” NWS meteorologist Brayden Murdock said. “And some of the feed has been taken away from it, too.”
The “feed” is the moisture that was anticipated to be gathered from a low-pressure system in the southern Pacific, Murdock said. Last week, the weather service said it anticipated a storm similar to an atmospheric river, because of all the moisture that southern system was carrying.
Instead, the path that moisture was expected to take was “interrupted,” Murdock said.
“The initial low pressure that was setting up to push moisture into our area has pushed far enough south that the path for the moisture that’s being pulled is now on a path to land farther north of us,” he said. “It would’ve been a conveyor belt of storms but that path is farther north and we’re going to get only a fraction of it.”
The rain that does fall is expected to arrive later Monday in the North Bay area of the region but is not expected to spread to the rest of the region until overnight into Tuesday. Rain is expected to fall steadily if not real heavily on Tuesday throughout the region and is expected to taper off Wednesday afternoon.
“The farther south you go,” Murdock said, “the less you’ll get.”
Areas of the East Bay in Alameda and Contra Costa counties as well as the Peninsula are expected to receive about three-quarters of an inch from this system. The Santa Cruz mountains also are expected to receive that much and perhaps a bit more. San Jose and other areas of Santa Clara County are likely to get about only a quarter-inch.
In the Sierra Nevada, rain is likely on Tuesday and Wednesday, and some of the snow that fell during blizzard conditions last week may melt away amid temperatures that may reach the 50s. Snow is not in the forecast for the week.
The storm conditions last week led to a deadly avalanche last week. Two skiers also died in a separate incidents at Heavenly Lake Tahoe.
The warmer conditions that will pervade the Sierra Nevada also will take shape in the region following the departure of this week’s storm. Murdock said high pressure is expected to build later in the week, and that temperatures rise into the 70s in some areas of the South Bay and the high 60s elsewhere.
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