Enjoy the long weekend and warmer weather. A cold snap is headed Sacramento’s way
Soak up the sun, Sacramento, over Presidents Day weekend, because daytime highs will drop 10 degrees or more by midweek.
A cold snap will continue into next weekend, with even foothill communities potentially covered by a fresh blanket of snow.
Forecaster Katrina Hand, who works at the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office, said Sunday that a cold and unsettled weather pattern will arrive with bracing winds at 25 mph or higher as early as Tuesday.
After a forecast of 67 for Monday and 64 on Tuesday in the Sacramento area, highs will dip into the 50s Wednesday and the 40s by Thursday. Heavy snow is expected in the coming week along the Sierra Nevada.
“With this pattern change, we’ll see most of the precipitation in the form of mountain snow as the storm track is coming from a colder area,” Hand said, “so it’s bringing in more colder air and essentially, not a lot of moisture is going to be observed in the Valley in the Sacramento area.”
That’s how Hand sees things playing out through Thursday anyway. By next weekend, she said, she expects about a quarter inch of rain in the Valley. But it’s not expected to be anything like the torrential rain that the capital region experienced in the first half of January, she said.
On Tuesday, Hand said, there will be snow at elevations above roughly 4,000 feet and gusty wind in the northern Sacramento Valley and the Sierra. The bite of that wind is not expected to be quite as forceful for residents in the rest of the Valley, Hand said.
Starting on Wednesday and into Thursday. she said, there will be plenty of fresh powder to go around and could fall at elevations as low as 1,000 feet.
“The daytime high temperatures will be well below normal,” Hand said, “and we’ll also see some near to below freezing morning low temperatures towards the end of the week.”
She advised residents to bring house plants and pets indoors and to dress in layers if you’re going out early in the morning.
