#bryce-anderson

#bryce-anderson

"This is going to help fill that gap in minutes to hours lead time that's vital to know where the heaviest rain is going to hit," Ralph said. "And when and what communities are going to be affected so people in the preparedness community and water resource management community can take action to help protect people's lives and property."

While humans have assembled a lot of weather data, flash floods are too short-lived and localized to be measured comprehensively, the way the temperature or even river flows are monitored over time. That data gap means that deep learning models, which are increasingly capable of forecasting the weather, aren't able to predict flash floods.

When I spoke with emergency management officials last year, they all mentioned the same frustrating scenario. People ignore storm warnings until the precipitation starts falling, then suddenly everyone rushes out at once. The roads become congested with anxious drivers, accidents spike, and stores run out of essentials just when people need them most. But here's what really gets meteorologists worked up about this pattern. Modern weather forecasting has become incredibly accurate, especially for major winter storms.

The Met Office has put two amber and seven yellow alerts in place for Thursday, with chief forecaster Neil Armstrong describing the system as a multi-hazard event combining heavy rain, powerful winds and snowfall. Storm Goretti, which was named by the French meteorological service, has also been labelled a weather bomb by the Met Office as it strengthens quickly over the Atlantic before tracking towards the UK and France.

In November 2025, a massive storm rolled across the lower Mekong River delta, dumping multiple inches of rain onto the wide, flat river plain that covers much of Cambodia. The river rose and rose. The force of the water churned up mud from the river bottom. The muddy water flowed downstream and rushed into the many farming and fishing towns that line the Mekong's banks.

LIVE RADAR: Track storms as they move through the Bay Area with Live Doppler 7 Take a look at the chart above -- we will give each storm a number with 1 being the lightest type of storm and 5 being the most severe. This way you'll know what to expect. Number 1 means a light storm with 1/2 an inch of rain or less and likely lasting a few hours or less. Number 2 is a moderate storm with 1/2 an inch to one inch of rain forecast and could include scattered power outages.

The pattern change began Monday when the barometric pressure surrounding the region started to fall gradually. That increase in low pressure is coming from the southwest and the air is flowing north, opposite of many winter low-pressure systems that dip in from the Pacific Northwest. As a result, light but steady rain is expected to start in Monterey County and the Central Coast late Tuesday morning. The rain is expected to reach the region closer to San Francisco sometime Tuesday night, Murdock said.