Here comes some warmth.
It may come coated with cloud cover, but the National Weather Service said it also will signal that an almost month-long wet weather pattern that brought one storm after another to the Bay Area in February has shifted. The new pattern is promising dry weather at least through the first few days of March.
“We already have a ridge building overhead,” National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Gass said Wednesday of high pressure that is increasing off the Baja coast and creating the weather change.
As a result, he said, the rain from a fourth system that finally passed through the region late Tuesday and into Wednesday — approximately 72 hours after it was first forecast to arrive — was expected to be finished by late Wednesday morning. That system dropped light rain steadily.
The heaviest of it came in the North Bay, where about 1¼ inches fell in Santa Rosa and an inch dropped on Mt. Veeder in Napa County in the 24 hours before 6 a.m. Wednesday. About three-quarters of an inch fell in Mill Valley in Marin County; a half-inch fell in downtown Oakland, a quarter-inch dropped in Hayward and less than one-tenth fell on Concord. A half-inch of rain doused Mt. Umunhum in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but San Jose and most cities in Santa Clara County did not receive any measurable rain.
Next to come will be the warming trend, which already was beginning even as the rain fell, Gass said. That warm-up is likely to take some areas of the region including San Jose and Concord into the low to mid-70s by Friday. Closer to the water, the thermometer is likely to reach 70 degrees at the most but it more likely to stall in the upper 60s.
A slight cooldown then is likely to occur on Saturday and Sunday and continue into the first days of next week, Gass said.
As for the rain, Gass said a system could make its way into the region enough to create some chances for it in far northern Napa County on Saturday and Sunday but that the rest of the region is likely to remain dry.
“Even those rain chances are less than 20%,” he said.
As March arrives Sunday, the dry pattern is expected to be established and it remains to be seen how soon rain may make its way back.
“We are expected it to be dry for a while,” Gass said. “There are no significant indicators that rain is on the way.”
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