Eye on rain chances, forecast for Sunday March 17th
Mostly beautiful day with sunshine and mild temperatures despite the presence of a very unusual and quirky storm system just to our east. This area of low pressure dropped in from the north over the past couple of days and now is more or less sitting stationary over the Southwest. This gives our weather forecast computers plenty to do along with requiring forecasters to maintain constant vigilance trying to keep ahead of what to expect. This also can occur during our Summer Monsoon season when pop up storms can surprise us depending on how far moisture streams up from the south and east. Eastern parts of Southern & Central California have already seen showers, thunder and mountain snow. We are conditioned to usually look west and north for stormy weather and the same thing applies to our forecast computer. For Sunday, look for mostly mild weather across our coastal areas and building clouds for mountains and eastern areas. Pop up showers, mountain snow and possibly thunder could occur. It's unlikely, but not impossible that some of the storminess could drift all the way to the coastline. Might be a good idea to keep an umbrella handy and also keep an eye on the sky just in case.
Looking ahead, the low is not expected to move much through about Tuesday or even early Wednesday. This means we will continue to see threats for showers, mountain snow and isolated thunderstorms. Temperatures will stay on the cool to mild side with highs in the 60's and even low 70's. More clouds will drift in off the ocean for the second of the work week along with patchy marine layer fog. Temperatures next week look to stay on the mild side with gradual cooling by next weekend. We expect to stay dry and rain free as we head in to next weekend. However, some of our long range forecast models do see storms in the Pacific making their way toward Northern California and sliding south. For now we will keep the forecast dry through next weekend and update any rain chances as we head in to next week
