California Weather Blog: After another extraordinary mid-winter dry spell, major atmospheric river to soak NorCal later this week

California has experienced some serious “weather whiplash” over the past several months. Extremely dry conditions heading into the early fall months gave way to a relatively brief ~2 week period of extremely heavy precipitation throughout much of coastal Northern California in early December shattering local calendar date rainfall records in many places and even approaching all-time daily/December monthly records in a few spots around the Bay Area. These very high regional rainfall totals were caused by an influx of warm and moist air into California from the subtropics courtesy of a series of “atmospheric rivers” (the emerging technical term for narrow corridors of very high atmospheric water vapor transport, typically associated with mid-latitude storms). Despite the prodigious amounts of water that fell from the sky during the December event, most of this precipitation fell within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean–and the precipitation that did reach the Sierra Nevada Mountains fell mostly as rain rather than snow due to ongoing record warmth.

Then…the spigot shut off. … ”

Is the spigot about to turn on again?

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