Dreaming of a cold, wet Christmas
It may not be white, but it's likely to be a wet, cold and windy Christmas throughout most of Southern California.
A pair of fast-moving winter storms is heading our way, with the first storm expected to arrive on Monday, followed by a possibly stronger system landing on Christmas Eve.
The wet weather is predicted to arrive first in Northern California, with snow falling in the Sierra Nevada, including Mammoth Mountain, on Sunday morning. By noon Monday, skiers and snowboarders might be enjoying as much as a foot of fresh powder.
"It's going to be a white Christmas in the mountains," said James Oh, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Diego.
The storms aren't expected to be as powerful as the one-two punch that doused Southern California earlier this week, when heavy snowfall in the mountains forced the closure of three of the region's major north-south freeway routes.
Monday's storm is expected to be moderate in strength, bringing gusty winds to the area. The system will bring about half an inch of rain along the coast and as much as 8 inches of snow in the San Bernardino Mountains, forecasters said.
The storm arriving Christmas Eve is expected to be stronger and could bring as much as an inch of precipitation, Oh said.
Motorists should keep an eye on road conditions if they plan to travel in mountain areas. But at this point, the Monday storm is expected to dump rain, not snow, on the Grapevine, the stretch of Interstate 5 in northwest Los Angeles County, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist for the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
Temperatures will remain lower than normal. Highs on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are expected to be in the upper 50s throughout much of the region, about 8 degrees below normal, Seto said.
Get the latest on the forecast at The Times' weather page and the latest on weather conditions at ski resorts in California.
-- Rong-Gong Lin II
