Bay Area weather to stay in a mostly golden state despite nationwide storm

The Bay Area’s biggest weather question heading into the weekend is whether the slight change in the pattern that has turned a sunny-and-dirty sky into a cloudier-and-cleaner one will usher in rain eventually.

While Californians wonder about whether the weather might turn slightly, much of the rest of the nation is about to get a far different, much harsher experience.

A storm that forecasters are calling a potentially historic one is set to blast more than half the United States this weekend. It’s expected to begin Friday and drop snow and ice over a 1,500-mile path.

The National Weather Service said 132 million people nationwide are under alerts from snow, sleet or freezing rain. Those affected live as far north as New York, as far down the Atlantic Coast as South Carolina, and along the southern states from Georgia to New Mexico and into the Southern Rockies of Colorado.

Widespread disruptions are expected to create travel headaches.

“We’ll see if the airlines start proactively cancelling flights in these areas, as this hasn’t happened yet,” San Francisco International Airport spokesperson Doug Yakel wrote in an email. “If cancellations do happen, our focus will be on resources for stranded passengers and parking for those extra aircraft that would normally have been flying.”

According to FlightAware, a flight-tracking web site, no cancellations had been announced at any of the three major Bay Area airports early Thursday.

“Weather elsewhere in the country can cause ripple effects,” Mineta San Jose Airport spokesperson Julie Jarrett wrote in an email. “Travelers should be aware that any delays are more likely tied to conditions at their origin or destination, rather than at SJC itself.”

The weather service said that many areas will receive a foot of snow, and that extreme and record-breaking cold may spread in certain areas. Power outages are a major concern.

Here in California and the Bay Area, there will be no such issues.

“We’ve got an upper-level trough that’s cut off just to the south of us,” NWS meteorologist Roger Gass said. “The cloud cover and the cooler conditions are because of that system. It’s having much more of an effect to the south.”

Rain fell in Southern California on Thursday and was expected to continue in some places into the weekend, according to the weather service. The northern ridge of that trough allowed some rain to fall in the Central Coast and Santa Cruz County, as well, though Gass said no area measured more than five-hundredths of an inch.

Whether more rain from developments in the north may come next week remains to be seen.

“Maybe,” Gass said. “Strictly a maybe.”