Solano may see brief rain showers this weekend
Forecast models call for coastal showers on Saturday and a slight chance of inland rain through the weekend.
(Graphic by Solano News Update)
After unseasonably dry weather over the past few weeks, the Solano County area may see a little bit of rain this weekend.
Cold weather will continue for the remainder of this week, with average highs in the low- to mid-60s turning during the day with a mixture of clear and partly cloudy skies. Lows will remain in the mid- to upper-30s in the northern portion of the county and the low- to mid-30s in southern and coastal areas.
A trough in the Pacific Ocean will start to make its way onshore by early Saturday morning, bringing with it warmer temperatures throughout Northern California and a slight chance of showers along the coast.
By Saturday afternoon, some areas of inland Northern California — including Solano County — may see a shower or two, though the rain will be brief if it does appear. Higher elevations have a better chance of seeing rain, forecasters said in a weather bulletin.
Throughout Solano County, there will be a 25 percent chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday, according to AccuWeather (except in Vallejo where the rain chance will be 70 percent on Sunday).
Despite what may be a few brief encounters this weekend, forecasters say they’re not optimistic that Northern California will experience “an above-normal precipitation period for mid-December progressing toward the Christmas holiday.”
“There's not a single storm expected in the next week, and if you look out to about two weeks, it's staying quite dry with very, very minimal precipitation,” Dan McEvoy, a climate scientist and research professor, told KXJZ Radio (90.9 FM) in Sacramento last week.
That, compared with what’s already been a relatively dry season this year and last, has some researchers wondering if California is headed for another drought. But state officials say it’s too early to worry about that and point to the state’s history of variable and unpredictable weather.
“We have the largest year to year variability anywhere in the United States,” Michael Anderson, a state climatologist, told the radio station. “We can go from 2019, that had one of the wettest February's on record, then 2020 comes along and it’s the driest February on record and we have a dry year.”
Reservoirs are starting to dip slightly below average, KXJZ reported, but meteorologists and climate scientists say the weather pattern could shift toward wetter days in the near future.
“We've had dry starts like this, and I've seen that kind of storm door open and that leads to then a wet December, January, February — I'm really gonna have to wait and see how things evolve,” Anderson said.
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