To bookend a particularly wet February, another storm is expected to hit Southern California this weekend but the incoming rainfall should be relatively light.
The storm is expected to move into Los Angeles on Friday and continue through Saturday night, with periods of light rain and mountain snow, according to the National Weather Service. The Los Angeles area is expected to get between half an inch to three-fourths of an inch of rain, and between 1 and 1.5 inches of rain in the foothills and mountains.
“We will have several days of rain, but it’ll be pretty light accumulation,” said Kristan Lund, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “There won’t be any particularly heavy moments.”
Still, because the ground is already so saturated from previous storms there could be some risk of debris and mud flows on canyon roads, as well as some localized flooding.
In the mountains, it’s expected to snow 1 to 2 inches in elevations between 4,000 and 5,000 feet, with 2 to 5 inches in elevations between 5,000 and 7,000 feet and 5 to 10 inches above 7,000 feet, according to the weather service.
Interstate 5 and the Grapevine — a heavily used roadway that is often closed during heavy storms — could get around an inch of snow.
The weather service issued a winter storm warning for the Sierra Nevada foothills above 2,500 feet from 4 a.m. Saturday until 10 a.m. Sunday. Heavy snow is expected, with accumulations between 6 to 12 inches. Travel is expected to be difficult and drivers are encouraged to keep an extra flashlight, food and water in their cars in case of an emergency.
But in California’s highest mountains, blizzard conditions were predicted to roll in as early as Thursday, and forecast to hit the Lake Tahoe area by late morning and Mammoth Mountain by the afternoon.
In the Los Angeles Basin, the storm is expected to peter out by Sunday, with most of next week forecast to be dry until at least Tuesday, when there’s chance of another storm.
The latest bout of wet weather caps off a nearly historically wet February. The back-to-back atmospheric river storms that rolled through the region earlier this month triggered hundreds of landslides across Los Angeles, damaged homes and resulted in multiple fatalities across the state.
Downtown Los Angeles has received 17.89 inches of rain since Oct. 1, when hydrologists begin measuring annual rainfall. That’s about 7 more inches of rain than what’s normal for this time of year.
In the month of February alone, downtown L.A. so far has gotten 12.66 inches of rain, when it normally gets about 3.64 inches in an average year. February is already the fourth-wettest February since the weather service started keeping records in 1877. It’s also the wettest month in 26 years and is tied for the seventh-wettest month ever.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
