San Mateo County, Bay Area rainy through end of week

“We’re kind of just stuck in one big system of churning, and we get to see it pretty much through the end of the week,” he said.

It’s been a fairly dry winter for the Bay Area thus far. Even with the stormy weekend, by midnight on Feb. 2, water levels at San Francisco International Airport were 9.08 inches. A typical average for this time of year would be 11.13 inches, Murdoch said.

By the end of the ongoing rainfall, numbers could be leveled out, with some communities in the Bay Area receiving 6 to 9 inches of rain throughout the duration of the storm.

Higher elevations could see up to 8 inches of rain.

Luckily, that rain will be dispersed over time, Murdoch said, lessening the possibility of flooding.

“There’s some risk for flooding, but not very widespread or targeted, which is a good mitigating factor,” he said. “We’re doing OK on that. We’ve definitely had some worse atmospheric rivers.”

Most rain will fall earlier in the week, with about between a half inch and an inch forecast from Wednesday through Friday.

“Tuesday’s going to be our biggest impact day,” Dalton Behringer, another meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.

He said commuters on the roads Tuesday morning should be prepared for “a pretty nasty time.”

This storm is the largest of the calendar year thus far and other areas are feeling more of an impact. A wind advisory is also in effect for coastal areas to early Tuesday morning, with gusts of up to 50 mph in the forecast. The storm, part of an atmospheric river, arrived with rain over the weekend that dumped several inches in the North Bay and about an inch in the East Bay.

Atmospheric rivers are wide, long, bands of heavy moisture that usually begin in the tropics and blow with the wind or air direction. They can be as long as a thousand miles and move large volumes of water in the atmosphere like a river, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

Behringer said soil in higher elevations in the North Bay and Santa Cruz mountains is already saturated after this weekend’s rain and warned of a minor chance of landslides in those areas.