While the North Bay has received the brunt of the rain in the last two days, the San Francisco Peninsula and the East Bay will get a decent dumping Friday.
The rain has already been coming down in SF Friday morning and is expected to come in some heavier bursts starting by late morning.
As the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts, we could see an inch to an inch and a half today, while the East Bay should see an inch, as "the cold front is beginning its much anticipated southward march." Update: Scratch that, the Chronicle is saying, as the storm system parks itself over the SF Peninsula, we could see three to five inches in rain, putting November 22, 2024 almost on par with December 31, 2022, when we saw 5.45 inches of rain, the second-wettest SF day in recorded history.
📡8:48 AM Radar Update: A band of heavier rain is moving through the North Bay. Meanwhile, the cold front is beginning its much anticipated southward march, and heavier rain has reached the peninsula. pic.twitter.com/7DZkyOOgmN
— NWS Bay Area 🌉 (@NWSBayArea) November 22, 2024
"Those people who have been watching the North Bay get slammed are going to be the ones who feel it [Friday]," says NWS meteorologist Dylan Flynn, speaking to Bay Area News Group.
The North Bay isn't getting spared though, and after some historic rain and flooding in Santa Rosa, they will be seeing at least another half-inch of rain today, the weather service says.
Around the Bay we can expect 25-mile-per-hour winds today, with gusts of up to 40 miles per hour, so we should expect to start seeing some trees down in addition to some potential urban flooding.
Flood watches are in effect for areas around rivers and creeks, particularly in western Sonoma County, and the Russian River is expected to reach minor flood stage by Saturday morning, as the rain tapers off.
"This storm front basically hasn’t moved at all,” Flynn tells Bay area News Group. "The reason for that is that the atmospheric river is mostly stationary, and what we have was not the direct impact of it. But because that system was so strong as it moved in from the north (near British Columbia), we got the strong effects of it. It’s been anchored by some of the lowest pressure we’ve ever seen in the Pacific Ocean, so there was just nowhere for it to go."
That is changing, Flynn tells the News Group, because the weather system "kind of has spawned a child. A new low-pressure system has formed and that’s going to be the one that pushes the parent system south."
As for when we'll see a real break in the rain, it may not come until Wednesday, with light rain likely to continue on and off through the weekend and beyond. Wednesday is currently looking to be sunny and dry in San Francisco, with a high in the upper 50s. And Thursday, Thanksgiving, looks similarly rain-free at the moment.
