Califronia Weather: Next Storm Outlook!

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Michael Snyder, California weather watch. Today's April 17th and right now we're looking at the infrared satellite imagery and the sun is just coming across the lower 48 states here. But what we can see is there are some low clouds out there for some select locations. Southern California, just a few of them out there. Not too bad for the coastlines though. You go up the central coast, the Bay Area, you are largely cloud-free right now all the way up through Northern California. You got to go into the interior coastal valleys there to get any kind of low cloud activity at all. And it looks quiet right now, but we do have another storm system. It's all the way back here off to our north and west. And this is going to bring another interesting system into the state of California and along the west coast of North America. So, we're going to dive into those deta details as we go through the video this morning. So, if we take a look at the European artificial intelligence versus ensemble mean on the right. So, this is a really great way to compare what the weather models are showing you. And when you see the ensembles and the deterministic run kind of show this same agreement, you get the warm fuzzies because you kind of know that the forecast is likely to be high confidence. And there is that next storm system off our coastline as we go through the end of this weekend and on into the early portion of next week that is going to be with us. And you can see the trough kicking across the area there. And yeah, that trough kind of hangs out as we get some ridging building off to our north and west across the Gulf of Alaska. But yeah, you can see that troughing kind of hang back as we go through the 200 hour period there as well. So that should be interesting. And we will continue to watch this over the next few days, of course, and we'll take it day at a time, but at least this is not a huge heat dome here across the Southwest USA after that brutal march that we just went through. So looking at the Rex block, in fact, let me go back here a little bit.

[00:01:47]Actually, we're going to scroll a little bit further out. You notice how you get the high pressure up here off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Low pressure there. That's what's known as a Rex block. And these can be pretty slow moving though. So, so that troughing that gets going to the extended forecast might hang around a bit there. So, it'll be something interesting to watch. This graphic is from the National Weather Service there. Now, uh there is that marine heat wave ongoing. And if I update that, let's see what was the latest we got there. Believe this updates every day or so. This is the 16th. So yeah, it's been pretty warm here along the west coast of North America, but you got to remember that is the anomaly. That is a temperature anomaly from where we usually differences between where we usually are at this time of year. And you can see still pretty chilly water along the coastal areas here. That's why it's going to really be difficult to ever get any kinds of sustained very strong tropical system. Any kind of buzzsaw like those powerful hurricanes hit the Gulf of Mexico, the east coast of North America just really are not ever going to happen here in California this yet.

[00:02:45]Some major climactic change that is just really unforeseeable at this point. So yeah, even though things are warmer than normal, still nowhere warm enough to like continue to feed a tropical system making this path towards Southern California, that doesn't mean we can't get impacts, especially thunderstorms and very heavy rainfall and whatnot. Not you can get those remnants to move back up over the region, and you can get tropical storms close. You could get some wind damage and things like that, but it would not be those huge damaging tropical typhoons or hurricanes or cyclones that occur elsewhere in the planet. And this kind of really shows you this here, the history of these tropical systems. And when they do take that track and they get close to, for example, Los Angeles or San Diego, they really rapidly weaken as they get over that cold water. That's basically like having a dust devil and moving it over a green grass land. It's just not going to last long. And that's the same thing with the hurricane. You move it off that warm water and it dissipates really rapidly. Now, looking at this next storm system coming up, let's go ahead and scroll through here. We're now going on into the day on Sunday. There's Sunday afternoon. And by Sunday night, we start to bring some precipitation back into the area. And that starts to push the frontal system that wants to hang out a bit here as we go all the way on in through the day Tuesday. And this is going to have thunderstorm potential as well. It may drop some mountain snows.

[00:04:01]It may bring some precipitation. It tries to bring it down to portions of California. Doesn't show too much of it.

[00:04:07]This is definitely a central and northern California storm. It looks like right now. We'll continue to check back on that daily to see if that's going to change, however, and then we'll scroll off in the extended look at some of the fantasy stuff. It shows that troughing around and some precipitation off and on, but again, no promises of that.

[00:04:21]We're looking way too far off in the forecast as it is. Now, as we scroll through the next few days, let's go all the way on in toward the day on Tuesday.

[00:04:29]You can see we do get that instability.

[00:04:31]What we're looking at here is lightning flash density 6h hourly. And you can see the Sanwaqin Valley, Sacramento Valley, Bay Area, and doesn't look like much here for Los Angeles or San Diego as far as thunderstorms are concerned. we go on in through Wednesday afternoon. You still see some instability around. So, yeah, we'll be breaking down that system daily and we'll get some high resolution models here over the next couple of days or so. Um, looking at the European artificial intelligence on the left versus mean again on the right. You can see the best precipitation amounts are definitely going to be occurring here across central and northern California.

[00:05:05]And we'll definitely take it anytime you can get these storm systems. It is beneficial. And you can see that over the next couple weeks, it does bring some of that precipitation all the way down into Southern California, just not east of the mountains. Now, accumulative positive snow dep change in inches. If we go through, let's see, we go on to the day Tuesday. See it start to pile up a little bit there. Maybe some areas getting up towards a foot. Who knows?

[00:05:28]We'll see as we get a little bit closer to the event. Um, entire state. Let's see. Is this not updating? Just the snow pack here. We know it's pretty bad. And we did get a bump here recently. So, we're not going to spend too much time on that. I've been showing that daily.

[00:05:42]But as we go through the next few days, you can see we do bounce those temperatures back, but then that next system starts to roll in here and we start to cool things down a bit. So, yeah, no big heat dome or anything like that. No major cool down, but some of these areas are fairly substantially below normal as we go on in through what is that about April 22nd to 23rd. Just showing it there. Um, seasonal drought outlook. This was issued yesterday. And all the yellows you see on there, that is likely drought development will be taking place here across some of the state of California. We do have some drought out there right now, but it's likely going to get worse as we go through this upcoming summer. And there it is. Right now, we have some moderate drought and some abnormally dry in the yellow. And again, probably drought coming here over the next few months.

[00:06:26]There's the 6 to 10 day. Kind of a near normal below normal signal there as was issued yesterday as well. and that above normal signal does stay with us here across the southwest USA. So, thumbs up for that. We'll see how that goes. We'll be breaking that down on a daily basis.

[00:06:41]But otherwise, um yeah, still here in Spain. I'll be back on Tuesday, I believe, of next week. Man, the the jet lag's still kind of messing with me just cuz I've been waking up early in the morning. Can't go back to bed. I'm sure you guys anybody who travels kind of knows how that goes. But I'm hearing that it's about an hour for every or it's about a day for every hour you change. It's a 9h hour difference between Spain and the West Coast. So maybe I'm just still catching up. But anyway, hope you guys are having a good day. Otherwise, uh, click like and subscribe and I will catch you guys in tomorrow's