Storms Slam British Columbia and California Is Next

Stormy weather that has been battering the Pacific Northwest and southwest Canada is expected to spread into California in the coming days, bringing the region's first major dose of winter rains. The storms are arriving amid dire forecasts that this year’s El Niño, the climate pattern that scrambles and intensifies weather around the globe but especially in California, is one of the strongest on record. Several inches of rain soaked British Columbia on Tuesday and set off flood watches as a storm moved ashore, and the rain extended south into Washington State.

By Friday, the wet weather was expected to reach as far south as California, and several storms were poised to smash into the West Coast through the weekend. “All areas up and down the West Coast are likely to get precipitation over the weekend,” said Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. But there was uncertainty on Tuesday about just how much precipitation. Meteorologists were confident that California, which has been unusually warm and dry in recent days, was on the cusp of a pattern change, though they couldn’t say exactly how much rain would fall in the next week.

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