There's nothing resembling a serious soaking in the forecast — and even with a few soakings this rainy season is already looking like a failure by drought-relief standards. But there is a dash of rain possible this weekend, late Friday into Saturday, so it's something.
The National Weather Service's Bay Area Bureau was celebrating the first day of "meteorological spring" on its Twitter account on Monday, and indeed it's been pretty spring-like and balmy in these parts for a couple of weeks now.
But the bad news is, as you may have heard, the Bay Area is way below average levels for rainfall in this La Niña winter, despite that atmospheric river event in late January — and February was historically dry, just not quite as historically dry as last February, when 0.00" of rain fell.
According to the US Drought Monitor, the Bay Area is currently in a "moderate drought," and many parts of California around us are in "severe" and "extreme" drought conditions already.
March coming in like a lion. Next chance of some light rain looks to be Friday night or Saturday. Image shows latest Drought Monitor as of late February. #DroughtMonitor pic.twitter.com/Ey7zhVTkn6
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) March 1, 2021
An area of low pressure parallel to the California coast is keeping the clouds out over the Pacific, and according to Weather.com, we still only have a 40% chance of rain coming on Saturday, followed by clouds on Friday.
Wondering where all the clouds are? GOES-West 🛰️says they're all hanging out over the Pacific 🌊 as a low pressure moves parallel to the California Coast. Those stationary bright spots over the Western US? That's all snow!⛷️ #CaWx pic.twitter.com/EXEIZrsKn3
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) March 1, 2021
February is typically the wettest month of the year for the Bay Area, but not this year and not last year.
Downtown SF saw 1.71 inches of rainfall in the month of February, when a typical February brings 4.46 inches — so we only saw 38% of our average rainfall last month. In San Jose, it was even drier, with the city seeing only 10% of its normal February rain.
February 2021 goes into the record books as being much drier than normal, with rainfall totals ranging from only 10 to 38 percent of normal across the #BayArea and Central Coast. Average temperatures for the month were slightly warmer than normal at most locations. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/ldEHemSb9e
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) March 2, 2021
It remains dry and sunny throughout this week, with inland high temperatures topping 70 through Friday.
Late Friday night brings a chance of rain, which will persist into Saturday — and the spots most likely to see the rain are the North Bay and the Santa Cruz Mountains, but everyone might get a drizzle
As ABC 7 reports, there is second chance of rain arriving on Monday as well.
Photo: Liv Bruce