Rain Expected In San Diego County With Snow In The Mountains
Speaker 1: 00:00 The wind is howling rain and snow are falling. And even Hale is pelting some parts of San Diego County today. The winter storm closed the Petco vaccination site this morning, and also knocked out power to 1700 SDG and E customers before Dawn and areas scattered across the County. Alex tardy, a meteorologist for the national weather service in San Diego County joins us now, Alex, welcome. Thanks for having me on, Hey, so the power outages across the County that I mentioned are very likely due to high winds. Talk to us about the wind conditions across San Diego County. Speaker 2: 00:35 Yeah, that's exactly right. So last night when most of us were sleeping a vigorous cold storm right out of Alaska, Western Canada moved across our area. And so that did a couple of things. It brought rain, uh, beneficial rain. We need the rain, uh, but it also brought a little bit too much wind. Uh, and those winds were gusting all nights, uh, 20, 30 miles per hour. And in some other Wendy's locations over 50 miles per hour. So this wasn't the same animal when this was a wind coming off the ocean and we're not done with the wind either. The winds are gonna pick up again this afternoon, uh, across the ocean and across our coastal communities. Speaker 1: 01:15 Um, you know, it's been raining on and off since Saturday. How're the rainfall totals. Speaker 2: 01:20 Yeah, it really has. So these storms have kind of blended together. We had a break on Sunday, these two storms Saturday and today, Monday. So they're adding up to two big numbers. Uh, we have a lot of locations that are over an inch of rain, uh, with more to come this afternoon and this evening. So when all of a sudden done, we're talking about some of our wet locations and these are in the cities, uh, close to two inches of rain, at least everywhere, an inch of rain and a little bit more in the mountains, but in the mountain, that's been several inches of snow, including places like Julian. Speaker 1: 01:56 And how do the rainfall totals and precipitation totals compare to typical winter event? Speaker 2: 02:03 Yeah, that's the thing. So we were starting off really low. Um, prior to this storm, over the weekend, we only had two storms total. So we were sitting at about a quarter or 25% of average before this storm. So we've now kind of doubled the totals, uh, but we're still well short. Uh, you know, we're still about half of where we should be. So the good news is that more rain is in the forecast for later on Thursday into Friday. So we still got a long ways to go to get back to near normal, but it is beneficial rain. Speaker 1: 02:38 Um, as you mentioned, it's been snowing in the mountains, what areas and how much? Speaker 2: 02:43 Yeah, so, uh, we saw snow all the way down to about 2,500 feet. We saw cumulating snow down to about 3000 feet and we're still looking for additional snow this afternoon and even this evening tonight, uh, so some places will pick up six to 10 inches of snow, like Palomar mountain Mount Laguna, but even some of our towns such as Julian overnight picked up four inches of snow. And like I said, more snow is on the way. So the snow is piling up and it's noticeable up in those areas. They've had the plowing and chain controls in effect. Speaker 1: 03:21 And you said the storm is coming out of Alaska. Tell me a bit more about that. Speaker 2: 03:25 So for us here in Southern California, uh, this type of storm is, is, you know, maybe once a year, if we have a very cold, active winter, we might get it two or three times a year, but in this case, um, it's coming directly from the North. So we're getting pure Arctic air coming out of Alaska. Uh, it's not a good storm for Northern California. So believe it or not in Northern California, didn't see much out of this. Um, over the weekend or today they're going to get their rain from the atmospheric river Lake this week. But this particular storm here is coming directly out of Canada. So it's about as cold as it can get for our part of Southern California. Speaker 1: 04:00 Gotcha. So sum it up for us. What can we expect for the rest of the week? Speaker 2: 04:04 So for the rest of the week, you know, we catch a break, there'll be a few rain and snow showers when, when everyone's waking up tomorrow morning. So, so keep that in mind the roads, uh, in some unusual areas that low elevations will be IC tomorrow morning, especially if you get up early and you have to travel on interstate eight, for example, tomorrow morning, but by tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday afternoon, we'll see a lot of sunshine everywhere. Uh, we'll have a nice day on Wednesday and a warm up a little bit after really cold start that we talked about for Wednesday morning. The next round of rain is different. Uh, it comes from tropical moisture and it comes in Thursday late afternoon. It's gonna cover all of California. So first it'll go into the Bay area on Wednesday, then I'll hit LA Thursday morning. And then by Thursday afternoon, it'll be moving into San Diego and it'll be with us all the way through Thursday night and Friday morning. And that will be more of a tropical rain. So I don't expect any snow in the mountains except maybe way up around 6,000 feet by Friday morning. But overall, this is going to be a Rainmaker and significant rain too. We could see widespread inch of rain Thursday afternoon into Friday morning, even in the San Diego Metro area. Speaker 1: 05:22 I've been speaking with Alex tardy meteorologist for the national weather service in San Diego County. Alex, thank you for joining us. Speaker 2: 05:29 Thanks so much for having us.
