Rain is spreading across water-logged Northern California, raising the risks of floods and mudslides through the weekend, but the most damaging system is set to crash into the Bay Area Monday.
Heavy rain, high winds, and rising rivers are raising the prospects of power outages and more blocked roads as another atmospheric river storm, a long plume of moisture coming in off the Pacific, rolls over California Saturday and Sunday, the National Weather Service said. Another one second starting Monday will likely be worse.
“It is going to be wet for most of today and tomorrow, but Monday is the big day,” said Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center. “It will rain for the next few days and they have already got a whole ton of rain.”
Downtown San Francisco received 10.33 inches of rain from Dec. 26 to Jan. 4, making it the wettest 10-day stretch in more than 150 years and the second most precipitation ever recorded there, said Jon Porter, chief meteorologist for AccuWeather Inc. Monday’s storm will draw moisture from 2,500 miles across the Pacific and will likely land very close to San Francisco or just south of the city.
California has been hit by a series of these storms in recent weeks, which has already caused more than $1 billion in losses and damage, according to AccuWeather. At least five people have been killed and many more were forced from their homes. The storm Monday is set to come in as a Category 4 event on the five-step scale developed in part by the Scripps Institution for Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.
The institute expects another storm to hit late Wednesday. There is a moderate-to-high chance the storms will keep coming for the next two weeks.
