There’s a wet week ahead for Sacramento

It looks like Sacramento’s dry spell is broken.

There’s a wet week ahead for the capital region as two storms move toward the area, according to the National Weather Service. The first one should hit Monday and continue into Tuesday, dropping somewhere between a tenth of an inch and half an inch of rain on the city, said weather service meteorologist Cory Mueller.

“It’s not looking like we’ll see what we saw last week but we’ll definitely see some rain,” Mueller said.

A storm dumped a record-setting 2.38 inches of rain on Sacramento last Monday – nearly half an inch more than the previous record for Jan. 8 set in 2017. The deluge toppled trees, flooded small creeks and streams, and resulted in 12 car crashes between 8:10 a.m. and 9 a.m.

The first storm will be light on snow – Donner Summit should see 2 to 3 inches and less than an inch is expected for Highway 50.

The weather service predicts a short break from precipitation on Wednesday before a new system moves into the area late Wednesday night or Thursday morning, Mueller said. The storm will linger into Friday, especially in the mountains.

The National Weather Service is predicting a foot or more of snow from the second storm.

“Snow levels start kind of high but they fall quickly and look to become quite low,” he said. “It also looks a little wetter.”

Sacramento should expect a little more rain from the second storm than the first, he said.

The weather service forecast is showing valley and foothill rain ranging from a quarter of an inch to 2 inches.

Before last week’s storm, Sacramento was having an unseasonably dry winter. A high pressure system off the coast kept rain and snow from reaching Northern California, resulting in one of the driest Decembers on record and a thin snowpack in the Sierras.

This story was originally published January 14, 2018 at 10:56 AM with the headline "There’s a wet week ahead for Sacramento."