Quick Take
Santa Cruz will get some more rain this weekend, but nothing major as two systems roll through over the next few days. Going forward, it appears that El Niño conditions have morphed into La Niña conditions, but that doesn’t make the local effects any more certain.
Santa Cruz County has some wet days ahead this weekend as two mild-to-moderate rainstorms make their way into the area. However, National Weather Service meteorologists say the wet weather season is reaching its end.
NWS meteorologist Rachel Kennedy said the system that made landfall Wednesday evening will last through most of the day Thursday but bring only intermittent rain, with the majority of the precipitation having fallen overnight. In total, Kennedy said Santa Cruz proper and other lower-elevation areas of the county can expect up to ½ inch of rain through Thursday, while the Santa Cruz Mountains could see up to ¾ inch.
Another system will come through the region around midday Friday, said Kennedy, and it is likely to be a bit stronger. That system, expected to linger in the area until Sunday morning, could bring up to 2½ inches of rain in Santa Cruz proper and other lower county elevations and up to 3 inches in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Kennedy said wind won’t be much of a factor in either of these two systems. The first one will bring gusts between 15 and 20 mph, while the second will bring gusts between 20 and 30 mph. That’s a big — and welcome — difference from the 60-plus mph winds seen in early February’s storms that knocked out power for more than 20,000 Santa Cruzans. Early Thursday, the National Weather Service issued a wind advisory for parts of the region, including the higher elevations of Santa Cruz County.
Over the past year, meteorologists have been closely tracking the El Niño climate pattern that was predicted to take hold this year, conditions driven by the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. However, the past several months have seen that trend shift — surface waters have cooled, bringing forth a La Niña pattern.
El Niño is typically associated with colder and wetter weather in Southern California and other parts of the southern United States, along with dryer and warmer weather in the Pacific Northwest. Local effects are hard to predict, because Santa Cruz County lies right in between the regions with the strongest signals. La Niña does the exact opposite — weather in the southern United States gets dryer and warmer while the Pacific Northwest gets colder and wetter.
But once again, local La Niña is difficult to predict, said Kennedy, because Santa Cruz County is in the middle of the geographic areas that get the most noticeable effects.
Even if it’s hard to say what the rest of the year’s weather holds, Kennedy said that, so far, Santa Cruz County and much of the rest of the Central Coast are about right on par with average rainfall through this year, if not a little bit above.
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