April showers . . . in SoCal!

It rained, no, it poured in San Diego yesterday. Here's the proof.

I grabbed this radar image just after a line of storms moved across the city from the south late yesterday afternoon. Several other lines had already moved through the area. All told, the skies dumped just over half an inch onto the city. I even heard some thunder.

Click on the 24-hour precipitation map below to view it larger. My office is near Fashion Valley, just to the right of downtown and San Diego Bay.

Meanwhile, the mountains just east of the city got a light dusting of snow overnight.

This is a Webcam image from the obervatory on top of Mount Laguna taken around 1 p.m. today. Notice the patches of white stuff on the ground.

Amazingly, it was the largest deluge that I've seen since moving out here a year ago. Normally, when we get rain it falls in trace amounts as a drizzle or mist, nothing like the monsoons that regularly sweep through south Louisiana.

Things get kind of crazy here when it storms because people aren't used to driving in the pouring rain. The roadways tend to develop dangerous slick spots during showers because they accumulate a lot of oil on their surfaces during the long periods that separate storms.

The California Highway Patrol responded to 176 crashes in the area between noon and 10 p.m. yesterday, about triple the normal rate. Read the Union-Tribune's take on yesterday's weather event here.