Weather reprieve on Sunday, after record-breaking storm

The Bay Area will be draining, recovering and drying out on Sunday, following a powerful atmospheric river that pummeled the region with rain and wind, killing a man in Sonoma County floodwaters.

A drier low-pressure system arrived on the heels of Friday’s storm,  according to National Weather Service meteorologist Crystal Oudit. Sunday and Monday may deliver an inch of rain along the coast, but little rain inland.

On Saturday, cottony clouds drifted slowly across a cerulean sky, with intermittent sunshine. A narrow band of showers caused some minor flooding in the East Bay and North Bay, but the dramatic atmospheric river is gone.

Gusty winds knocked down trees and power lines in the Oakland hills, interrupting power to about 1,000 customers. In Los Altos, Foothill Expressway was closed on Saturday morning while a large fallen tree at the Loyola Bridge was cleared.

The atmospheric river, created by plumes of tropical moisture, broke records in a large swath of northwestern California – especially parts of Sonoma and Marin counties.

Santa Rosa experienced 12.45 inches of rain, marking its greatest rainfall in a three-day period in recorded history. That’s about one-third of the town’s yearly average.

National Weather Service calls that a 1-in-1,000-year event. While no one recorded a downpour in the year 1024, models calculate that there’s only 0.1% chance of getting that much rain.

Flooding claimed the life of a driver, who has not yet been identified, in west Sonoma County near the Russian River town of Rio Nido. At about 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, a bystander called the Sheriff’s Office to report a vehicle in the floodwaters near Mays Canyon Road and Highway 116, according to officer Rob Dillion. Crews were able to recover the occupant of the vehicle, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

But the rains brought signs of life in long-dry Bay Area creeks.  Chinook, or king, salmon were spotted Saturday swimming upstream to spawn in the Los Gatos Creek. The life cycle of these prized fish takes them from their birth in the Bay Area’s rivers through a downstream migration that deposits them in the San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long. Their bodies adapt to saltwater through a migration out into the ocean, then they return to creeks to spawn, usually three years later.

“After the first rain, the salmon have made it to Campbell Avenue,” near Los Gatos Creek Park, where they were seen jumping, said Mike Tamaro of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition.

This weekend also marked the beginning of rainbow season, with beautiful multicolored arches from around the Bay Area posted on social media sites. Rainbows are created by sunlight refracted through water droplets in a storm-drenched sky.

Skiers and snowboarders are celebrating opening weekend at Palisades Tahoe, where cold rain turned to snow on Sunday morning, adding about eight inches on the resort’s upper mountains. Due to strong gusts, there was a wind hold on the resort’s new gondola.

“Chains off. Chains on. Repeat … Chain Control is back up,” on I-80 at Donner Summit, according to a California Highway Patrol post on social media.

“Winter’s playing games,” it warned, “and we’re all just along for the ride.”

Staff writer Stephanie Lam contributed to this report.