The last in a series of three storms to hit the Bay Area set raindrops falling in parts of the region before sunrise Monday and was set to to coat other parts with showers as the day progressed, according to the National Weather Service.
Forecasters anticipate it will be the only rain of the work week.
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“We still have a lot of time, and things can change,” NWS meteorologist Lamont Bain said. “But those are the current indications. It’s a little hard to tell how much moisture will feed into the next system and how it’s going to proceed. But what we know is that outside of (Monday), the rest of the work week is going to be relatively dry.”
The new system that the weather service is eyeballing is out over the ocean and still developing, Bain said. Once it arrives it will have to plow through a gradual building of high pressure that the weather service said will keep the Bay Area clear once Monday’s storm passes.
The rain Monday hit even as the Bay Area still was drying out from a powerful storm Saturday that brought a tornado to Santa Cruz County and heavy winds elsewhere. The driving rain also caused floods and powerful surf along the coast.
Those elements are expected to die down a bit as the final storm in a system stemming from the Gulf of Alaska finally moves out of the region. The weather service cancelled a flood advisory for areas of Santa Rosa.
“It’s going to be mostly light, maybe some moderate rain,” Bain said of Monday’s anticipated precipitation, adding that “we’re not anticipating” any of the high winds that battered the region or a continuance of the dangerous surf and king tides that have been present.
“The coastal flooding we’re still going to be dealing with a little bit at least through (Monday) afternoon,” he said. “We believe the king tides will start to dissipate.”
The region stayed mostly dry Sunday following the Saturday battering, with only a handful of cities recording measurable rain over a 24-hour period. The most was the one-tenth of an inch that fell at Point Reyes in Marin County.
On Monday, the North Bay again will get the heaviest activity with as much as an inch of rain possible in the North Bay coastal ranges and a half-inch in other areas of Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties. The weather service said rain already was falling in those areas Monday morning.
The East Bay is expected to get between .15 inches and a quarter-inch, while the South Bay likely will get no more than about one-tenth of an inch, according to the weather service. Bain said rain in those two places was expected later in the morning or mid-afternoon.
Once the rain stops, the weather service will turn its attention to the next one.
“We’ll have a better idea what that one might do as we move through the week,” Bain said. “Until then, we can expect it to be dry.”