It may feel like spring if you're outdoors this weekend, but another winter storm is headed to the region starting next Wednesday, though it’s not expected to be as strong as some videos on social media are claiming.
Sacramento area temperatures are predicted to be around 70 degrees on Sunday, a nearly 10-degree jump from Friday. Some areas could approach record-high temperatures for those days, according to the National Weather Service.
It will be a pleasant, but temporary, break from the recent wet weather hanging in the region.
Courtney Carpenter, a meteorologist with the weather service in Sacramento, said that the next storm system will be similar to the one that rolled through Sacramento last weekend, which dropped 1.7 inches of rain on downtown Sacramento.
"We're expecting a warm, wet atmospheric river storm to impact the area Wednesday into early Saturday next week,” Carpenter said. “We'll keep an eye on amounts and wind speeds but it doesn't look like anything too extreme in the way of magnitude."
She said by Thursday, snow levels will be around 6,000 feet. A foot of new snow is possible at the highest elevations. And for the Sacramento Valley, moderate to heavy rainfall could cause ponds to form on roadways and may lead to flooding of poor drainage areas.
"We are expecting high elevation snow with this system, so mountain travel issues near our pass levels and gusty winds at times may bring down some tree limbs and cause difficult driving conditions, especially in the mountains when combined with that heavy snow," she said.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said that while the storm could cause some minor flooding in the Sacramento region, Northern California won’t get the brunt of the storm’s impacts.
“Interestingly, this looks like a pattern that may have the largest impacts way up north in British Columbia and then also way down south in Southern California, with fewer impacts the whole segment of the West Coast in between,” Swain said.
The upcoming storm has caught the attention of social media content creators, enough to alarm state officials.
On Jan. 22 the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center put out a report warning of the possibility for an “impactful atmospheric river event” for the West Coast around Jan. 30 through Feb. 5.
Since then videos on TikTok and posts on X, formerly Twitter, have made claims that the storm system could be a devastating scenario researchers such as Swain have called the ARkStorm. This refers to a future winter megaflood scenario California researchers first proposed in 2011.
Many researchers have attempted to debunk the claims online. The California Office of Emergency Services even released a video Friday countering one post that has gone viral this week.
While Swain says there’s a potential for significant flooding in the next couple weeks, a storm of that magnitude is not on the horizon.
As of Friday, the weather service was forecasting around 1.5-2 inches of rain in Sacramento, with a 35% chance of more than 2 inches.
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