Light showers in the Bay Area signal start to rainy season
Aside from the cluttered leaves on sidewalks and noticeably darker evening hours, the first rainy weather in months for most Bay Area residents was another sign that autumn has arrived.
By 5:30 p.m., rain totals in Oakland were one-tenth of an inch, seventeen-hundredths of an inch in San Francisco, three-hundredths of an inch in Concord, and only traces of rain in San Jose, according to the National Weather Service.
A moderate chance of thunderstorms remained in Butte, Mendocino, and Shasta counties into Sunday afternoon, but the Bay Area is not expected to see anything similar.
“We’re expecting the rain to basically taper off as the evening progresses, and by tomorrow morning, it should be relatively past us,” Dial Hoang, a Bay Area NWS meteorologist, said, adding that more rain could fall on the Peninsula before next weekend.
The light rain served as a foreshadowing of the colder months ahead. Meteorologists predict that a summer El Nio will result in warmer, wetter winter months in California.
The Bay Area is still reeling from last winter’s flurry of successive rainstorms, which included several atmospheric rivers and lasted until late March.
However, meteorologists say that the rains on Sunday, which caused no known damage to local city infrastructure, do not indicate how wet the upcoming season will be.
On social media, the NWS Bay Area summarized its assessment of the downpour: “Not bad for October.”
