The Bay Area is getting a break from the rain after a four-week series of storms that brought above-normal precipitation to virtually the entire state.
The wettest spots in the Bay Area got more than 20 inches of rain for the month. The rain gauge in Venado, a spot in the hills west of the northern Sonoma County town of Healdsburg, recorded 27.56 inches in January. San Francisco picked up 6.94 inches, 54 percent above its normal amount for the month. The storms helped build the Sierra snowpack to its healthiest level in five years, with water content in the snow now at 10 percent above average for this time of year.
The little movie up above there gives a dramatically sped-up look at the series of storms that visited the state. We cobbled the video together from about 1,500 images from NOAA's GOES West satellite, one recorded every half-hour taken between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31.
The pictures are not quite the same as standard satellite imagery. Instead of showing visible light, they depict water vapor detected by an infrared imager (here's a technical description of water vapor images).