Checking the Bay Area Rain Gauge After Our Latest Soaking

Update, Tuesday, Jan. 19: The rather modest little Tuesday storm that was featured in the Bay Area forecast turned out to have a bit of a punch after all.

The early-morning rain prompted the National Weather Service to post an urban and small stream flood advisory for the entire nine-county Bay Area and then, when that expired at midmorning, similar alerts for virtually the entire Sacramento Valley and the northern San Joaquin Valley, as well as western Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

Rain totals for the 12 hours ending at 10 a.m. Tuesday are -- what's a good word? -- robust.

Santa Rosa recorded 1.51 inches of rain, San Rafael 1.18 inches, downtown San Francisco 1.17 inches, the Oakland Museum 1.08 and San Jose International Airport .40. The reliably rainy mountain and ridge weather stations got significantly more, including 2.88 inches at Venado, west of Healdsburg, 2.47 inches at Mount Tam's Middle Peak, 2.13 at Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 1.54 atop Mount Diablo and 1.52 on Vollmer Peak in the Berkeley Hills.

We'll be updating our rainfall table, and maybe turning it into a nice map, when we get a little breathing room.

In the meantime, you're asking when the next rain will arrive. The National Weather Service Bay Area forecast office in Monterey says we're due for a drying-out period from Tuesday afternoon until late Thursday night. We're supposed to see rain off and on through Saturday. After that, the next storm is expected sometime in the middle of next week.

Original post, Monday, Jan. 18: While we get a few hours to dry out -- yes, after the soaking we got Sunday night and early Monday we're going to partly withdraw complaints about errant weather models and the feeble effects so far of El Niño -- let us take stock of how much rain fell overnight, as well as how much we've gotten this month.

For the 24 hours ending at 10 a.m. Monday, the usual, higher-elevation suspects were reporting the most rain: The Middle Peak weather station on Mount Tam got 4.32 inches, Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains got 3.26 inches, and Venado, a place in northern Sonoma County you'd never know about if there weren't a rain gauge there, got 2.48 inches.

Those three locales are also the wettest so far since our holiday break from the rain ended Jan. 3. Since then, Venado has topped 20 inches, Mount Tam has gotten better than 16 inches, and Ben Lomond has recorded nearly a foot. See the table below for those and other regional totals.

The National Weather Service says the next storm is due to sweep in early Tuesday, bringing the possibility of a period of heavy rain during the morning commute hours. The storm will not have access to the same kind of dense plume of moisture that fed the Sunday-early Monday deluge, so rain totals are expected to be between a half-inch in lowland areas of the central Bay Area to an inch and a half or more in hilly locations.