California Storm: Cold summer storm and potential for Sierra snow

Tracking a cold summer storm with wind, rain and snow on the way. I'm ABC 10 chief meteorologist Monica Woods and this is an unseasonably cold pattern for our summer season and we're gonna be tracking it all. You can see how things are going to be developing over the course of the work week and into the beginning of our weekend, this low pressure system pushing its way southward along with that storm track and our cold summer storm will take shape by Thursday into Friday. We're going to be, uh, tracking those big weather changes and that's going to be the timeline for these weather impact alert headlines when Thursday through Friday, wind storm and snow on the way. And then also a need to prepare for the potential for showers, mainly north of I 80. But nonetheless, we're all going to be feeling some kind of change in our weather forecast. Mainly some fall, fills in our outlook satellites and radar depicting that low pressure system that we been, uh, basically dealing with over the course of the week and still pulling its way northward here. It did deliver some showers over the weekend, even a few isolated thunderstorms right around the California Oregon border. Not much of an impact locally outside of the fact that we got some gusty winds on Saturday and a drop in our temperatures. But the bigger low poised to the north of us is going to give us even bigger changes ahead in the forecast winds will pick up first. That'll be the first impact that we start to see. Thursday mainly starting to see those wind gusts at about 20 to 25 MPH in the valley. But the bigger risk especially for fire danger is gonna be in the Sierra on Thursday. That's when we see this uh chance of significant fire potential because of high risk due to winds. We've got increasing dry winds, low humidity as well as low fuel moisture. That's ahead of the chance for showers that heads our way on Friday into early Saturday fire season comparison. Just kind of take a look. We've seen some pretty big fires break out, especially the park fire, the fourth largest in California history. You can see the acres burned to date over 820,000 for California. That's below what we saw last year at this time, which happened to be one of those years that we just didn't see significant fires throughout the state. We saw a couple that were pretty, uh big but nothing that compares to what we saw this year. And then our five year average also, we're running ahead of that as well. So this has been a pretty big fire season for us, especially since we saw some really big heat in July into early August preventing a spark. Just a couple of key reminders here, avoid using certain equipment that could spark fires, including but not limited to lawn mowers, also keep vehicles off of dry grass. We've seen plenty of vehicles that are having difficulty pull over and they may be having some overheating issues and then they start a grass fire right at the side of the road. Also, cigarettes and matches, make sure those are properly disposed. Don't wanna flick those out of your cars because we got a lot of dry grass right on the side of the roadways, especially at this point in the season, several months without any significant rain. Here's a look at the August rundown and this is what I was talking about. We saw some early, uh, month heat especially as we started off that first week and a half or so where we saw highs ranging anywhere from about 100 to 105. Then we started to see that shift to a slightly cooler weather pattern, kind of flirting right around our average high. But over the weekend, we saw that low deliver the gusty winds on Saturday and that brought us into the eighties staying there on Sunday and actually for our Monday, we started to warm things up ever so slightly, but our average to date, running slightly ahead of our average for August. We're gonna drop that it looks like even below our average high because we've got a big pulse of cool air moving in. Now, this is by the way, the longest stretch this summer below 100 degrees. We've been seeing temperatures below the century mark since August 8th. We hadn't seen that since summer began where we've seen a stretch beyond a couple of days at a time that we didn't have at least a sprinkling of a 100 in there for downtown Sacramento. But now we get some of that big blast of cooler air. It really affects us on Friday. That'll be where we see the widespread cool air move in and for the Sierra, it's gonna be well below average big temperature drop topping our headlines, breezy conditions on Thursday as well as that chance for showers and our snow level near about eight, about 8000 to 8400 ft. So again, that first load that came in just kind of draping us with some high level cloud cover, had some active weather earlier this uh weekend and then the big low is just up to the north of us and that's what really comes crashing down here into northern California and delivers the bigger weather changes. The first low, not a real key player here in the forecast in terms of the big feel that we'll have of the changes coming our way by the end of the week. But you can see how those showers start to move their way into Northern California during the day on Friday, kind of pressing their way southward here. This particular weather model not going out much farther than that. The long range forecast does indicate that we will have right along that I 80 line that chance for showers and as that shower activity interacts with the cold air in this year. That's where we see potentially overnight Friday into early Saturday, that snow line dropping to about 8100 ft. Now, this is gonna be short lived. I will say we won't get used to these temperatures because we've got a very likely warmer weather pattern shaping up for the end of August into the first part of September. In fact, for our 10 day forecast, we actually have a 100 in there and it won't be too long after that high of 78 that we get back to some of those extreme conditions. So highs in the seventies for this year or tomorrow, we're in the eighties and lower nineties for much of the foothills across the coast. It's a mix of sun and clouds. We're at 74 for San Francisco for our Tuesday forecast, inland areas. We're in the low nineties. Sure. It is feeling nice outside for the morning hours, temperatures in the fifties to start us off for morning lows with our afternoon, highs warming into the mid and in some places, almost the upper nineties for tomorrow afternoon. That's our warmest day this entire week after that, we start to kind of chip away at that heat. Highs will drop to the fifties for this year. So even if we get a light dusting of snow, it'll melt really quickly. This isn't gonna pro uh produce big travel impacts for this year, but it certainly is something that'll catch you off guard if you're not, uh, prepared for it in the foothills, we'll see those highs in the upper eighties near 90 then all the way down to about 67 on Friday. Slight chance again north of I 80 that we could see some of those showers mix of sun and clouds at the coast are highs dropped from the mid seventies on Tuesday into about the upper sixties by the time we get to our Friday forecast. So we'll call for a weather impact alert on Thursday, mainly because of the breezy conditions, slightly elevated fire danger on that day. And then on Friday, that's when we bring in that slight chance of seeing a few showers. So Friday night football might want to bring a jacket and the umbrella. Our highs will be in the upper seventies. And then like I said, we are right back to the summer heat by the time we get to the end of the weekend into the beginning of the next work week with highs closer to about 100. So again, these are gonna be the big days that we see the fall fields out there. We've got our entire weather playlist, by the way, an in depth forecast on our ABC 10 plus app as well as explainers, weather specials. Emmy award winning special, including the future of California's Water. You can watch it for free on Apple TV, Roku and Fire TV, just download it. It's live local and always on an extended forecast. Just like this are right there at the touch of your screen.