Drizzling rain and gathering-darkly overcast this Thursday morning on California’s north coast, as we weather the first wet encounter/wave of a supposedly-terrific storm scheduled to collide with our coastline sometimes this evening or early Friday.
According to the NWS, we’re forecast today to be ‘Heavy Rain and Breezy,’ but notches up a bit tonight to ‘Heavy Rain and Windy‘ — the coastline could get 2-to-4-inches of rainfall the next couple of days, with wind gusts tomorrow along the bluffs maybe up to 45-mph.
Chunk in the possibility of ‘isolated thunderstorms‘ round-about, and you’ve the makings for the first, real storm of the season.

Apparently, fairly-normal.
Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services (SFGate): ‘“Because of the northern coast and the Cascades, they naturally get more rain. They average 150 inches of rain per year. That’s 8 times more than San Francisco.”‘.

(Illustration: ‘Rain,’ by Brad Sharp, found here).

We don’t really get all that much, nestled next to the Pacific Ocean, the real-heavy rain falls inland.
A good, snap-nutshell look this morning at the weather for the next few days from Northern California Weather Blog:

There are a couple of things that make this a unique pattern.
The storm that will spread rain over the area today and tonight has moisture in it from the remains of Typhoon Songda.
However, the actually remains of Songda are still well out in the Pacific.
This means very heavy rain over Northern California later today and tonight.
Strong gusty south to southwest winds will precede this storm with gusts 50 to 55 mph in the north end of the valley and 65 mph over the higher elevations.
The precipitation will turn to showers Friday night and the winds will subside.

Although more concerned with the interior, Weather Blog is pretty cool-informative site.
And on Saturday, the second system wails through, and once again heavy rain and wind even here along the coastline, though, no snow yet on the forecast.
Via The Weather Channel: ‘A powerful storm will track near or over parts of the Pacific Northwest Saturday, with effects lingering into Sunday. The strongest winds would occur immediately ahead of and behind the time the front sweeps through, particularly along the coast. Heavy rain, coastal flooding and at least some high-mountain snow are also expected, lingering into Sunday.’

Meanwhile, back east it’s still way-summer.
Due to heat — from Bob Henson at WunderBlog yesterday:

Last month was the ninth warmest September for the contiguous 48 U.S. states in records going back to 1895, according to the monthly national climate summary released by NOAA on Wednesday.
While temperatures were close to average from the Great Basin to the West Coast, the central and eastern U.S. had an uncommonly warm segue to meteorological autumn.
The states of Iowa, Louisiana, and every state east of the Mississippi except for Tennessee and South Carolina had a top-ten-warmest September, and it was the hottest September on record for Ohio.
Average minimum temperatures (nighttime lows) were the warmest for any September in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, as well as the District of Columbia.
This toasty month followed the fifth hottest U.S. summer on record. September 2015 was the second warmest on record for the contiguous U.S., and it’s now been a full decade since the nation last saw a cooler-than-average September (2006).

Not just California with a drought:

A regional drought intensified from New York through New England, with Maine having a top-ten-driest September.
As of October 4, the coastal stretch from southeast and central Massachusetts to central Maine was in extreme drought, with moderate to severe drought covering most of the rest of New York and New England, according to the weekly Drought Monitor from October 6. (Rains of 2” – 4” associated with Matthew over Rhode Island and southeast Massachusetts may put a modest dent in the drought there.)
It was also unusually dry across the lower Mississippi Valley, Colorado, and the West Coast states of Oregon and California (where September is normally a fairly dry month).

Nowadays hard to tell the seasons apart if it’s always hot…