“Rain, rain, rain, rain,
Why’d you cause me so much pain?”
—”The Rains Came,” Sir Douglas Quintet
Southern California got a little spritz of rain over the weekend—nearly a fifth of an inch yesterday in the desert town of Blythe. Here, it’s dry, and the California-Nevada River Forecast Center sees only a small chance that rain will fall over the northern part of the state in the next week (and that will be far north of the Bay Area). Our local National Weather Service forecast office, in Monterey, reads the models the same way: “Dry and mild weather will continue through at least the next 7 days … with little variation in the upper level weather pattern. A series of storm systems will move towards the region over the next week … but pass to the north and east of the area. ” The longer-range outlook from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is for drier and warmer than median weather.
Here’s the local NWS table on precipitation so far this year. And below that, today’s theme song
| Station | July 1-Dec. 18, 2011 | % of Normal | July 1-Dec. 18, 2010 | % of Normal | July 1-Dec. 18 Normal | July 1-June 30 Normal |
| SFO Int’l Airport | 2.87 | 50 | 5.76 | 101 | 5.69 | 20.11 |
| Oakland Airport | 3.06 | 52 | 6.66 | 113 | 5.91 | 17.42 |
| Mountain View Airport | 1.73 | 45 | 3.24 | 85 | 3.83 | 13.35 |
| San Jose Airport | 1.53 | 39 | 3.05 | 77 | 3.95 | 15.08 |
| Santa Rosa Airport | 4.45 | 42 | 13.19 | 123 | 10.70 | 31.91 |
| Salinas Airport | 3.31 | 103 | 3.45 | 107 | 3.21 | 12.91 |
| San Francisco Downtown | 3.35 | 47 | 7.88 | 111 | 7.08 | 22.28 |