For an all-to-brief moment as the sun dipped toward the horizon Wednesday, a crack of sky appeared amid the ever-growing gray clouds and lit up the region with a bedazzling sunset. Yet, even as that was happening, the first handful of drops from an anticipated atmospheric river storm were beginning to come down.
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Then, in what seemed to be a flash, the dazzling red-and-orange glow was gone, and the night air seemed even darker than usual because of quickly thickening clouds that started leaking more droplets of rain not much later. Before the sun arose again, that leak turned into the downpour that the National Weather Service said is expected to soak most of the region.
It may not be completely dry again until Sunday.
“Everything is kind of panning out,” NWS meteorologist Matt Mehle said Thursday morning. “It came in a bit slower with the onset of the winds and rain, but what we anticipated is happening.”
What wasn’t anticipated was rain through the weekend, but Mehle said that no longer is in play. Another system moving up from the ocean near Southern California is likely to bring the region another one-tenth to an inch of rain, he said.
“It won’t be a complete washout, but we do expect more rain,” he said.
The wave of rain Thursday came just as expected, with the main storm front arriving near downtown San Francisco and sending its impact primarily up the North Bay, where wind gusts reached 60 mph in the Marin Headlands and 3.16 inches of rain fell in less than a 24-hour period just north of Guerneville.
A high wind warning for the North Bay and Marin Hills remained in effect until 10 a.m. Thursday morning, along with a high wind advisory for the Peninsula and East Bay.
Rains and wind also were pounding the central part of the region, too. The weather service recorded a little more than an inch of rain in Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, three-quarters of an inch in La Honda, a quarter-inch in San Francisco and just less than a quarter-inch in Richmond by 6 a.m. Friday. Hayward saw .07 inches.
Other areas — San Jose with .04 inches, downtown Oakland and Livermore with .03 and Concord with .01 — had not seen rain as heavy, but the weather service said those totals were expected to rise with rain falling much of Thursday morning.
Gusts in those area also were blowing in excess of 25 mph, according to the weather service.
“The winds are really strong,” Mehle said. “They’ve been pretty stout since midnight, and they’re getting stronger along with rain. It’s definitely going to be mostly wet and windy for most of the day.”
The storm front is expected to be through the region sometime Thursday afternoon, Mehle said.
“Then it will transfer to isolated showers after that,” he said. “It won’t be so much a constant rain as it will be more isolated areas.”
Those showers are expected to last through Friday night, with a small break to follow before the anticipated system moving up from the south arrives.