0800 UTC
NOAA's water vapor satellite of the east Pacific Ocean. It is considered a GOES West Satellite. (click here for 12 hour link - thank you)
The big brown spot is the standard high pressure system that deprives California of rain most of the time. There are two systems of significant water vapor entering the west coast USA.
The systems bringing rain to California is the 20th hurricane in the east Pacific named "Seymour." It was a Cat 4 yesterday, but, do to the strong jet stream carrying enormous amounts of water vapor to northern California, Seymour is losing velocity and entering into the weather pattern for central and southern California.
Central California will actually have a mixing of those two systems and may result in high turbulence.
October 27, 20160830.19z
UNISYS Water Vapor GOES West Satellite (click here for 12 hour loop - thank you)
This is just about the same moment as the NOAA satellite. There is a difference of 30 minutes. The high pressure can be noted as well as the strong jet stream (which doesn't manifest very often anymore) that turned Seymour from a water based hurricane into water vapor for southern California.
Kindly be mindful of the low lying areas and the people settled into them. They may be some of the most impoverished and migrant works as well. The agricultural sector in California rely on those migrant workers for their harvest. Those workers have children as well.
October 26, 2016
By AP
...Rainfall Totals (click here) ranging from a half-inch to 1.5 inches were expected across parts of Northern California.
"The mountains will see upward of 2 inchdes of rain," forecaster Steve Anderson said. Along the Central Coast, the weather service issued a flash flood watch for a burn area from Thursday into Friday morning...
Every fraction of an inch of rain that makes it to the ground means California is resolving it's drought. Often water vapor will disappear over severely droughted areas, but, it doesn't simply disappear. The water vapor that evaporates and does not make it to the ground adds to the air mass and it's ability to rain. When rain reaches the ground of a severely droughted land, the air mass is already saturated enough to allow the rain to reach Earth.
