SAN FRANCISCO – The deadly bomb cyclone that produced flooding rain, debris flows, damaging winds and massive waves in California this week has dissipated off the West Coast, but a series of additional atmospheric river storms will continue to pound the Golden State from this weekend through next week.
This week’s storm was blamed for at least two deaths in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to firefighters, a child was killed Wednesday inside a home hit by a falling redwood tree in the rural Sonoma County town of Occidental. In Fairfield, about 65 miles to the east, police said a 19-year-old woman was killed when her car hydroplaned on a partially flooded road and slammed into a utility pole.
There is scant hope for drier weather in California anytime soon, according to the FOX Forecast Center.
The next round of heavier rain will move into the coastal ranges of Northern California and southern Oregon on Friday afternoon, courtesy of another atmospheric river. This storm system will impact the region through Sunday.
Rainfall could become hazardous and lead to scattered instances of flash flooding. The consistent stream of moisture being funneled out of the tropical Pacific Ocean will continue into Saturday as the rain gradually expands southward to Central California by Sunday.
An additional 3 to 6 inches of rain, with locally higher amounts, are possible and could worsen flooding concerns throughout what has become a very saturated region.
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Additionally, the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and Northern California will see more rounds of heavy snow. The heaviest snowfall is forecast to remain over the Northern California mountains on Saturday before eventually spreading south by Sunday.
Another extremely impactful atmospheric river will bring even more rain to California from Sunday night through Tuesday.
“We have this ridge of high pressure that is pretty much off of Baja in Mexico, and that is helping funnel in all of this tropical moisture from the Pacific, but also, it’s acting as a conveyer belt to throw all of these areas of low pressure from the Pacific into the Northwest,” FOX Weather meteorologist Britta Merwin said.
Unlike this weekend’s storm, which will be focused across Northern and Central California, the one early next week will affect the entire Golden State. Heavy rain will pose a significant threat of flooding from the California-Oregon border southward to the Los Angeles Basin.
That’s because this storm will have copious amounts of moisture with which to work, and the FOX Forecast Center warned that it’s becoming increasingly likely that the flooding will be far more serious than anything experienced so far during the recent onslaught of storms over the past few weeks.
Given the saturated soils, streams and creeks could quickly flood, and all the water may eventually cause mainstream rivers to rise to levels that would result in widespread flooding across the northern half of California.
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As if that weren’t enough, yet another round of rain and snow is expected to hit California later next week.
According to the FOX Forecast Center, between 4 and 8 inches of additional rain are expected to fall from this weekend through the end of next week across the lower elevations of Northern California. Even higher rainfall totals are predicted along the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where 10 to as much as 20 inches of additional rainfall is possible during that time.
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Even Southern California could pick up 1 to 4 inches of rain in the lower elevations, with as much as 8 inches possible in the mountains surrounding the L.A. Basin.
“The overall rain forecast for the next seven days is taking into account multiple storms, and some of them will be producing some heavy rain,” Merwin said.
Meanwhile, the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada will likely get blasted with 2-plus feet of snow – perhaps as much as 10 feet in mountains that see the most persistent and heaviest bursts of snow.