After major cooldown Monday, we'll be coasting through nice weather for the next 48 hours.
Wednesday looks beautiful, with highs in the Valley in the low to mid 70s under partly cloudy skies and good air quality.
Thursday looks warmer, with highs closing in on 80 in Bakersfield, but still a nice, calm day.
Most of Friday looks good too, but late Friday our next storm system approaches.
That gives us gusty winds and a chance of light rain late Friday into Saturday, as well as cooler weather into the weekend.
The focus of the next several days though will be stronger system approaching California Sunday into Monday.
This system is still a little too far out to nail down any concrete details, but model runs have been consistent enough for us to be on the lookout for the first significant storm of the season.
The Sunday to Monday storm looks to have some tropical moisture with it, which means a much higher likelihood of rain.
It's likely that we'll pick up at least a soaking rain, with totals of a quarter inch or more across most of Kern County.
However, models are also showing a band of heavy rain developing with this system.
If that heavier rain band were to set up over Kern County (as some models have been showing) we'd be on the lookout for heavy rain, that may actually be a little too much.
It's odd to think about too much rain given our exceptional drought, but heavy rains could produce urban flooding and even mudslides or debris flows in our mountain communities, especially those with fresh burn scars.
Again, heavy rain is a possibility, not an expectation with this system.
The details are too fuzzy to call for anything that specific at this point, but we'll continue to track this system and refine our forecast as we get closer to the weekend.
