Just like the first one, the second weekend of the new year will bring some downpours and dustings of mountain snow to the San Diego area.
A south-moving storm will begin dousing the county with rain and frozen white flakes late Friday night or early Saturday, the National Weather Service advised.
Most coastal, inland-valley and mountain locales will get anywhere from a quarter-inch to three-quarters of an inch of precipitation, and the deserts likely will receive between a quarter-inch and a half-inch of rain over the day, meteorologists predicted. The snow level is expected to reach around the 5,500-foot level.
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The rainfall, which may be heavy at times, should begin dissipating late Saturday morning and the storm system is expected to leave the region by Sunday evening, according to the NWS.
San Diego has already had more than five inches of rain for the winter season.
“The rest of January looks to be above normal and then for the rest of the wet season it looks like a slightly above normal prediction for precipitation for Southern California. Not a strong correlation but a slightly stronger probability of above normal precipitation,” said James Brotherton of the National Weather Service in San Diego.
This year’s wet weather comes after one of the driest rainfall years in San Diego County. Just over 3 inches of rain fell last winter.
The average rainfall between October and April in San Diego is a bit over 10 inches. The rain does more than soak neighborhoods.
Imperial Beach residents have already lost access to their beaches this week because raw sewage is fouling ocean waters. It was more than a month ago that a large sewage pipe in Tijuana burst and Mexican sewage began flowing into U.S. ocean waters. The flow of tainted water through the Tijuana River Valley stopped Friday because a diversion pump was running.
With rain in the forecast, the situation is expected to change.
“That combined with big surf and storms is problematic, not just because of the sewage pollution because when we get coastal flooding now we get sewage polluted water coming over those berms and into our streets,” said Serge Dedina, Imperial Beach mayor.
Another period of scattered showers is in the forecast next week for the far southern reaches of California, possibly beginning as early as Monday and continuing, off and on, as late as Friday.
