Extreme winter weather is buffeting the US, bringing the first-ever blizzard warning to the San Diego region and rare reports of snow falling in the San Francisco Bay Area.
(Bloomberg) — Extreme winter weather is buffeting the US, bringing the first-ever blizzard warning to the San Diego region and rare reports of snow falling in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A cold and potentially dangerous winter storm is slated to bring heavy rain, gusty winds and even snow at much lower elevations than normal to much of California on Friday and Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
Both the Los Angeles and San Diego offices issued blizzard warnings for the regions around those cities, with the Los Angeles warning the first since the mid-2000s and the San Diego warning the first on record, Bryan Jackson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, said in a telephone interview Friday morning.
“Significant mountain snows are expected into early Saturday with major impacts to travel,” Jackson said. “There’s a likelihood of downed trees and power lines, with blizzard conditions.”
Small amounts of snow were reported across the San Francisco Bay Area, causing some car accidents, the local NWS office said. Snow levels are expected to rise rapidly by late Friday morning in Southwest California, according to the NWS office based in Los Angeles.
About 93,000 homes and businesses in California were without power in the early hours of Friday, according to PowerOutage.us.
Read more: California’s Huge Snowstorm May Ease, But Not End, Deep Drought
(Updates outages in sixth paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.