United States

Find the Warm Weather Wear

December 7, 2010; 12:47 PM ET

If you live in Southern California and have been wearing all those cool-weather clothes of late, you may want to dig around and find the t-shirts and even shorts for the weekend.

The stormy weather that is hitting the Northwest for several more days, and brings rain and higher Sierra snow as far south as the Bay Area to Yosemite at times, will be replaced by a rather large upper-level ridge building up from the south for the weekend. For the Northwest this will not be strong enough to stop the precipitation train, though it does shift more north with time, but closer to this ridge it will help create a significant warming trend.

Here is what the GFS has for the 500 mb pattern for Saturday afternoon.

A 588+ high is parked just off the Southern California coast. This alone will not bring the warm weather. In addition to the ridge, a decent offshore pressure gradient will exist Saturday and Sunday. These two things combined will bring unseasonably warm air to areas west of the mountains from the south-central coast to San Diego County. Temperatures just inland from the beaches will rise to near 80 Saturday and into the lower and perhaps even middle 80s for the Sunday. All this with sunny skies each day. There can be some wind Saturday into Sunday morning in the typical Santa Ana wind areas, but the wind will not get out of hand since it is only pressure driven with no upper level support.

The deserts of California, southern Nevada and Arizona will not be as warm as coastal areas but still will be pleasant with mostly 70s in the low deserts and middle 60s to low 70s upper deserts.

If you live in the Central Valley of California the warming will be hindered by an increasing inversion that is likely to trap cooler air in the Valley and also may even promote late night and morning areas of low clouds and fog.

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