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The end to a wild week of whipsawing weather across Northern California is at hand.
Sunny skies, calmer winds and cooler temperatures are forecast to return to the Bay Area on Saturday and linger into early next week, offering a respite from a weeklong parade of storms that felled trees, flooded roadways and caused power outages affecting thousands of people.
In the Sierra, clouds were expected to part beginning Saturday, potentially allowing skiers easier access over Interstate 80 and Highway 50 to take advantage of several feet of fresh powder around Lake Tahoe.A few final rounds of rain and gusty conditions were expected throughout the day Friday, particularly around midday and into the early afternoon as a final band of storms sweep through the region.
But in a word, the weather should be “beautiful” for the last several days of 2025, said Dylan Flynn, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
“The sun will be shining, the wind will be light — it’s going to be really nice,” Flynn said. “The only potential drawback will be cooler temperatures that could dip overnight into the 30s for parts of the Bay Area, making it “noticeable, especially compared to how warm it’s been,” he added.
The calmer forecast comes after a drumbeat of storms pummeled the Bay Area, bringing with them hurricane-force gusts that toppled trees and left many residents celebrating Christmas in the dark.
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Several thousand people were without power Friday morning, the vast majority in the Santa Cruz Mountains, along with other parts of the Peninsula and in the South Bay, according to Pacific Gas & Electric’s outage map. In all, the storms knocked out power to more than 777,000 people across PG&E’s California network, and about 41,000 of those people remained in the dark late Friday morning, said Paul Moreno, a spokesman for the utility provider.
Overnight Thursday into Friday, the weather service received reports of downed trees affecting Highway 152 and several boats damaged in the Santa Cruz Harbor from more bands of storms that rolled through the area.
Radar indicated a potential water spout in Monterey Bay right outside of Santa Cruz on Christmas Day, Flynn said, though it was not immediately clear whether it came ashore and caused any damage. The weather service also issued a tornado warning over the Santa Cruz Mountains later in the day, though it later appeared unlikely that anything touched down. Formal survey teams have not yet been dispatched.
Perhaps the greatest damage to emerge late this week came at the Lick Observatory atop Mt. Hamilton, where gusts of up to 114 mph on Christmas Day ripped open the shutter to its 36-inch Great Refractor dome, the observatory announced Friday. The dislodged shutter, which weighs more than two tons, “fell outward onto the roof of the Great Hall, crushing several structural beams,” according to a press release.
Though the telescope itself was not damaged, repairs to the facility are expected to take months. Complicating matters are the fact that the telescope’s precision lenses and electrical systems could now be “vulnerable” to precipitation, the observatory said.
“This was a frightening moment for our staff,” said Matthew Shetrone, deputy director of the University of California Observatories, in a statement that lauded his staff’s work to protect the telescope. “When the storm broke, everyone was safe, but the spiritual core of our observatory had been damaged.”
In all, since the first storms came ashore last weekend, Oakland and San Francisco have received more than 4 inches of rain, while the Oakland and Berkeley hills — along with the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest — received between 5 and 8 inches of precipitation, the weather service reported. San Jose received about 1.75 inches of rain, while similar totals were measured in Mountain View and Palo Alto and slightly more than 2 inches fell over Fremont.
The highest totals came in the North Bay, where Mt. Tamalpais received 15.11 inches of snow over the last week, according to the weather service. More than 6 inches fell in Tiburon, and Fairfax.
To the east, snow continued to fall over the Sierra — providing a direly-needed lift to Lake Tahoe-area ski resorts that had delayed their openings amid an unseasonably dry start to the season.
Several ski resorts reported another two feet of powder from early Christmas morning to just before dawn on Friday, according to Scott Rowe, another National Weather Service meteorologist. That latest dumping left Soda Springs with 72 inches of snow so far this week, while Kirkwood reported 59 inches of powder, and Bear Valley said it had received 58 inches of snow.
Borreal reported 47 inches of snow this week, as of early Friday morning, while 58 inches of snow had fallen at the summit of Palisades Tahoe.
Accessing those ski resorts remained difficult Friday. Caltrans continued to enforce chain controls over Interstate 80 over Donner Pass and Highway 50 over Echo Summit. Still, the new solid base layer of snow was a welcome sight.
Just a week ago, on Dec. 19, California’s statewide snowpack was at 12% of its seasonal average, with the state’s northern-most peaks registering just 4% of its normal snowpack total for that date, according to the California Department of Water Resources. Central California — including much of the Lake Tahoe region — also was at just 12% of average.
But as Friday, the state stood at 69% of its snowpack average for the day after Christmas, with northern California coming in at 44% of average and the Central Sierra reaching 73%. More snow was expected to continue falling Friday before easing off this weekend.
“We’ll take any snow at this point in time,” Scott said.
Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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