According to UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, Northern California could see extremely dry conditions — "with zero rain or snow in most spots" — well into the middle of February, a dry spell that will probably be observed throughout California and elsewhere along the West Coast.

The local meteorologists had high hopes that the remainder of this month and early February would see this winter's record-breaking rainfall continue, even though it was largely absent over the past few weeks. This week was supposed to be a wet one; it wasn't. This coming week, too, had the promise of bringing with it much-needed precipitation; that probably won't happen, either.

And according to one SoCal-based climate scientist, the Bay Area, as well as most of Northern California, won't see much — if any — rain or snow for at least the first half of February.

"Unfortunately, there's just no hint of any meaningful precipitation on the horizon for California over the next 2+ weeks, now heading into mid-February," reads the first tweet in a series of two from Swain. "This northeastern Pacific ridge sure is starting to look awfully resilient on 6+ week timescale."

According to the Bay Area chapter of the National Weather Service (NWS), SF has recorded less than an inch of rain in January — a dismal amount when compared to December's deluge that saw atmospheric rivers and cyclone remnants drop over 15 inches of rain in the city. Last month, in fact, culminated into one of the wettest water years — the calendar span between October 1st to December 26th — since 1983.

It was enough rain to even pull the Bay Area out of D3 and D4 drought conditions. The entire region, however, is still experiencing "(D2) Severe Drought conditions," per the U.S. Drought Monitor’s current map.

But with off-shore wind events and other atmospheric anomalies forecasted, NWS's Global Forecast System (GFS) is showing that spell of history-making rainfall coming to an abrupt stop. Worse off, this might set Northern California up for a year marked with very little rain. The fact that this January will also inevitably pass as one of the driest ever recorded for various Bay Area cities (like San Jose and San Francisco) stands as more evidence of what's foreshadowed to come.

"Extremely dry conditions—with zero rain or snow in most spots—are likely to continue across all of California and indeed much of the West into mid-February," Swain continued in his Twitter thread. "Temperatures will also warm to above-average levels, increasing mid-winter snowmelt in mountains."

Suffice to say now might be a good time to adopt water conservation practices as we enter 2022 with no rain or snow or any drought relief expected in the near future.

Related: Nevermind About That Rain Next Week

Photo: Getty Images/Sundry Photography