The thunder that rattled Bay Area homes early Sunday and the lightning that’s expected to continue throughout the day amount to one of the biggest summer storms the region has seen in years, meteorologists say, and it comes as a result of an unusual set of circumstances.
Tropical Storm Fausto, which was moving across the Pacific more than 1,000 miles south of San Francisco on Sunday afternoon, was shearing off moisture that abnormal winds were pushing toward Northern California, according to local meteorologists.
Combine that moisture with the atmospheric instability of a record heatwave and you get the once-a-decade lightning storm that has been starting spot fires across the region.
Wondering where this moisture is coming from bringing us these thunderstorms? Check out this GOES-17 infrared imagery and follow the moisture back to Tropical Storm Fausto#CAwx pic.twitter.com/cOWq5pABcs
— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) August 16, 2020
“This was a Bay Area-wide, multi-hour, severe-thunderstorm event,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It’s a pretty spectacular event.”
Rainfall totals from the storm have so far been low, less than a tenth of an inch in most of the region. However, parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Mount Diablo have seen close to a quarter inch.
Isolated summer thunderstorms happen in the Bay Area every 10 or 20 years, according to Jan Null, adjunct professor of meteorology at San Jose State University. But he can’t remember anything so extended or concentrated in his 46 years of meteorology as what is taking place this weekend.
Moisture from the subtropics does not often reach the Bay Area, he said, and that moisture has arrived at the right temperature and humidity to create thunderstorms.
Rusty Simmons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jsimmons@sfchronicle.com kgalbraith Twitter: @Rusty_SFChron
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What’s behind this once-in-a-decade Bay Area thunderstorm? - San Francisco Chronicle
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