Pedestrians walk along Powell Street on Monday, Sept. 19, 2022, in Emeryville, Calif. Dry weather and warmer temperatures are forecast for the Bay Area this week. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Dry weather is about to return to the Bay Area. Honest. To hear the National Weather Service tell it, the transition from the wet days simply did not move as fast as forecasters anticipated.
“We will eventually dry out,” NWS meteorologist Joe Merchant said Tuesday. “But there are still some scattered light showers out there. It won’t be anything like what happened Monday.”
Monday brought a final outburst of rain from a pattern that’s ushered in mostly wet weather since Christmas. The weather service anticipated only a handful of moderate showers throughout the region, and they were expected to be finished by sometime Monday night.
Instead, the final storm cells moved slowly through the area and dropped sometimes intense rain. About 1 ¾ inches of rain fell in central San Rafael in Marin County, and 1 2/3 inches fell in areas of Santa Cruz County. San Francisco received an inch of rain, Oakland had three-quarters of an inch, San Jose got one-third of an inch, and Livermore and Concord a bit more than one-tenth of an inch on Tuesday.
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“The dynamics that drove a lot of what happened on Monday were expected to be a lot farther south than they actually were,” Merchant said.
That slow storm movement will lead to a few more scattered showers Tuesday, primarily near Monterey but also near San Francisco, Merchant said.
“Those are going to be pockets of really light rain,” Merchant said. “Then we’re finally going to get into some dryer air.”
The dry pattern is expected to last at least a week and will drop temperatures significantly, according to the weather service. Overnight low temperatures are expected to drop into the 30s in some areas, the the daytime highs won’t get out of the 50s.
The weather service also re-iterated that the king tides that coincided with the storm surge over the weekend have receded to almost normal levels but that the beaches will remain hazardous on Thursday and Friday. Breaking waves are expected to swell up to 20 feet.
Originally published at Rick Hurd