A focused Sunday-through-Tuesday storm brings the only meaningful snowfall window, with the best accumulation in Canterbury and lighter spillover elsewhere. Guidance supports a regional high-elevation refresh around 20 cm-30 cm at the top end, while most other fields stay in a modest 1 cm-6 cm range. Expect mostly dense to moderate snow quality during the core burst.
While cold-stunned iguanas fall from trees in Florida and videos circulate of frozen "exploding" trees in the Northeast, Southern California is working up a sweat. A midwinter heat wave has descended on much of the state and is expected to spike temperatures as much as 20 degrees above normal in the coming week. The summer-like heat is thanks to a ridge of high pressure lingering high in the atmosphere that extends through the San Francisco Bay Area and into the Pacific Northwest.
The pattern change began Monday when the barometric pressure surrounding the region started to fall gradually. That increase in low pressure is coming from the southwest and the air is flowing north, opposite of many winter low-pressure systems that dip in from the Pacific Northwest. As a result, light but steady rain is expected to start in Monterey County and the Central Coast late Tuesday morning. The rain is expected to reach the region closer to San Francisco sometime Tuesday night, Murdock said.
Our weather is set to stay unsettled for the next little while with more rain, showers and blustery conditions to come, Though it will turn milder as we head into the weekend with warmer than average temperatures for this time of year. As we head into next week then staying mild and quite breezy with further outbreaks of rain on both Monday and Tuesday,
It's turned into an unusually dry winter for Northern California, and that pattern, thanks to a ridge of high pressure, is going to continue for at least the first 10 days of February. As the Chronicle meteorology team tells us, the dry and balmy conditions will be with us through Super Bowl Weekend and beyond, continuing a pattern that has left the Sierra snowpack mighty low.