Califronia Weather: Active April to Continue!

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Michael Snyder, California weather watch. Today's April 16th and right now it is what about uh jeez I don't even know what time it is on the west coast there. It's 4:30 here anyway in Valencia, Spain. I know it's sometime in the morning here for you guys and we're taking a look at the visible/infrared satellite imagery. If I stop it there, you can see the sun starting to rise across the state. You see our kind of dry frontal system moving here. The inside slider brought some precipitation in Northern California, but it's not doing much here as it pushes its way on south. There's even some fog banked up across the foothill areas. You can see some of the snow across some of the higher terrain there as well. But we do have a more impactful storm system that is coming.

[00:00:40]We're going to dive into those details and a couple other things as we go through the video here this uh afternoon and this morning depending on where you are. Uh and again kind of looking at that you can see some precipitation is skirting across portions of northern Nevada here but not much to speak of right now across the state of California. So taking a look here actually let's start with this one here.

[00:01:00]This is a wider look at the North Pacific Ocean. You got Japan to the far left. I want you to concentrate a little bit there on Sloaku. That is a typhoon out there in the western Pacific Ocean.

[00:01:08]There's the Hawaiian Islands and there's state of California. So this is our inside slider right there across the Pacific Northwest dropping down across the Rocky Mountains there. Kind of building a bit of a temporary ridge here as we go through the end of this week.

[00:01:21]And then we bring our next impactful system. Look at that nasty boy right there off the coastline. That's going to bring a couple rounds of precipitation with it as well. Some more mountain snows. Let's keep things active here through the second half of April. Why not indeed? So that is going to be another beneficial system for the state of California. And if nothing else, it's definitely not a big heat dome or anything. But if I scroll back and forth a little bit there, did you notice where Slaku went? Starts to get absorbed into the westerlys. And when it does, so it is bringing a lot of energy with it. So usually these typhoons when they merge, they can have it's tough for the models to forecast that they can build big ridges. They can amplify it out in front of those uh those typhoons that merge up in the westerly become mid- latitude cycles. you see this big ridge get going as we go on in through what is that Wednesday night of next week. You see this big ridge coming all the way up into British Columbia and along the west coast of North America. And that doesn't always mean that we're going to be kind of in the ridge there though. That ridge may stay a bit further north. We could keep some of this troughing going. So that'll be something interesting that we watch over the next few days or so. Now if we take a look at one more time here again you can see all the water vapor here associated precipitable water here but there's a lot of energy with that system. If I put that into motion, you'll see it get caught up in the westerly. It starts to interact with that much colder air. It becomes a mid- latatitude cyclone south of the Illutian Islands there. It'd be comparable to bringing a big pot of steaming water into a walk-in freezer and just big energy release, big heat transfer from the equatorial regions towards the polar regions. It's a battle earth can never win and is always ongoing. But you see the associated atmospheric river here.

[00:03:00]Then of course it's going to bring that ridging downstream. just really amplifies it out in front of that mid- latitude cyclone. So, that is what we'll be dealing with here over the next week or so. Now, taking a look at the sea water out there or the ocean temperatures. This is the anomaly. This doesn't mean that this is just bath water here, but it is well above normal.

[00:03:19]This is a substantial marine heat wave here uh for, you know, the west coast of Mexico, Gulf of California, and up into Southern California. Things are pretty close to where they would normally be in the summertime. But if you take a look at the actual temperatures, you need to be in the orange to really sustain a tropical cyclone in these waters. As soon as that starts to move over this colder water, you'd get some massive degradation and you'd really dissipate the system before it got into Southern California. So, it's it's pretty low chance that the anomaly will stay at this level as we go on towards the summertime. So, it may be above normal here, but it's not like you're going to be bringing any kind of big huge hurricane into the state of California where it's going to be like Hurricane Andrew or something that you get in the Western Pacific. Just the water does not support a strong system like that. That doesn't mean you can't get some big impacts. You can still get big flooding rainfalls and even some gusty winds, but for the most part, you're not dealing with 120 plus mile per hour winds or anything like that. Category 3 plus stuff is never going to come into California. Not in this current climate.

[00:04:22]But we just have this, you know, this cold uh current there off the coastline.

[00:04:27]It continues to bring cooler water down our coastline. So, it kind of protects us from that. So, looking at um if you go back in history, you can see how the water where it is much warmer. And I shouldn't have clicked on that. Let me go back. There we go. You can see where the water is much warmer out here, where these hurricanes are much stronger. And I keep clicking on that. Uh but yeah, we are not dealing. You can see how they really die when they get further north over that cooler water. They really die off. off. I think the blues there are just tropical depressions and you can see an occasional tropical storm try to make its way into the southwest USA, but again they are not nearly as strong as what you would get in the Gulf of Mexico along the east coast of the USA or off in the western Pacific Ocean. So anyway, hope that makes sense. Uh and then we'll take a look here now at the European model. Again, there's that dry frontal system kind of passing through here as we go through this morning, not bringing much in the way of precipitation, maybe a stray shower over the Sierra Nevada.

[00:05:18]Then we dry out for a couple days, but by the time we get towards Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, you can see our next system really ramping up off the coastline starts to bring that precipitation in earnest as we go through the day on Monday for some of the Bay Area, Sacramento Valley. Another round of snow for the Sierra Nevada.

[00:05:34]Look at that frontal system rounding point conception and moving into Southern California there as well. So, yeah, pretty impactful storm as we go off in towards the 6-day period. Again, a couple nice rounds of snow here potentially for the mountains and uh again, maybe even down to Southern California. Some measurable precipitation coming in with that one and definitely keeping us below normal temperature- wise. And if we look here at the European artificial intelligence, I'll scroll through there. You can see total precipitation in inches. Well, we'll get into these details a little bit more as we get closer, but looking at 15 days, most of that comes with that next storm system. You can see another big bout of precipitation here even into the Sacramento Valley, the Bay Area, inch 2 in down the central coast and maybe even into the Peninsula range there as well. Now, uh total snow 10 to1 ratio as well. Let's scroll through this a little bit here and I'm going to go out a little bit. Internet's being a little bit slow there, but if we go through next week, you can see as we go through Tuesday and Wednesday, you start to bring another nice round of snowfall for the Sierra Nevada. We will definitely take it. It's definitely beneficial cuz we are way below normal here. Now, our reservoirs in the state of California are much better than they are like in the Pacific Northwest where you really need the snowpack up there because you just don't have the reservoir storage that you do in the state of California. So, the reservoirs are good, the snowpack is not, but every time we get one of these little bumps, it just kind of prolongs that snowpack across the higher terrain. That's good for the ecology of the region and whatnot. So, yeah, these are definitely beneficial. Now, if we take a look over the next six days here on the European model there and we scroll through, there goes our inside slider. We warm up a little bit here as we go through the weekend. But then as we go through next week, you can see that cooler than normal weather start to return with that troughing that's going to be around. And there's the 6 to 10 day. Kind of a near-normal look. Here's some below normal across portions of the Southwest.

[00:07:22]And there's the 6 to 10 day with the above normal precipitation. Thumbs up for that. But otherwise, yep, I'll probably be out here till uh next Tuesday. I should be back in the studio by next Tuesday or Wednesday. So, I'll try to do these briefings here daily.

[00:07:35]We'll just take it one day at a time and I will catch you guys in the next forecast.