Good Morning Central Coast! Thursday brought us significant rain but our rain chances are not over yet, much more rain is expected through the weekend.
Rain fell through much of the day into the overnight hours Thursday accumulating to several inches in northern San Luis Obispo County. Elsewhere rain totals were less than an inch, but still very significant. Here is a look at some of the rain totals across San Luis Obispo County. NW SLO County saw the highest rain totals from this portion of the storm. Rocky Butte saw 3.74" of rain with more to come this weekend.
In Santa Barbara county there was less accumulations overall but still significant rainfall.
Check out this link for up to date rain totals.
Jumping right into the forecast, this was just the first of two significant systems. The next one is gearing up and will arrive this evening and bring heavy rain to the region once again and potentially double rainfall from Thursday.
This next event is actually two storms meeting and merging near the Central Coast. There will be an upper trough to the NW and a SW stream of moisture moving in ahead of it.
This appears to be a marginal to moderate "atmospheric river" event. That "river" is the SW stream of moisture supply which can get focused on an area and really crank up the rain potential. Some models are very bullish on this showing cumulative rain up to 6", however, the median on modeling is more like 1-3+" with some locally higher amounts on S-SW facing slopes and mountains.
Currently, there are no advisories, earlier today there were wind advisories popping on and off. It will be locally windy with this first system as S-SW winds 10-25mph precede the front moving thru the area. There are higher gusts, but there are right on the edge of advisory criteria.
I think it is entirely possible more advisories will be needed for late Friday into Sunday if modeling continues to suggest some of these 1-3" additional inches of rain. We are saturating the ground right now, so that much new rain could cause some localized flooding. This will likely come in the form of flood advisories.
Have a great day Central Coast!
