The dramatic cooldown we experienced on Wednesday was expected and the cloud surge. The addition of ample smoke from wildfires on the California-Oregon border made for a gray day for much of the area. Temperatures were down dramatically, especially in the interior.
Thursday we'll see more of this as an upper-level trough continues to dominate weather in The West.
Daytime highs on Thursday will range from the 50s and 60s at beach communities to the 60s and 70s in the coastal valleys with low 70s in the interior.
There's so much low cloud cover that the overnight lows will generally be in the 50s and 60s. Suffice it to say, that temperatures will not be very dynamic on Thursday.
There looks to be some warming setting up Friday through the weekend, but it will be most significant in the interior when the daytime highs return into the 80s. Closer to the coast temperatures also increase but only by a few degrees into the weekend.
Across the board, once the temperatures come up for the weekend they look to level off into next week.
Another interesting wrinkle to the forecast is the position of the subtropical jet which looks to entrain some moisture from a tropical cyclone in the eastern Pacific. We should see some high clouds entering the area associated with this Friday. A few raindrops are possible with this surge of some tropical moisture. The better chance would be in Southern California, but I can't rule it out for the South Coast.
There looks to be so much low cloud cover overnight into Thursday morning and again Thursday into Friday that a few pockets of mist and drizzle can't be ruled out.
In terms of smoke and haze, the upper-level low starts to pull out on Saturday and the steering flow for the smoke switches from northwesterly to southwesterly which will remove smoke from the skies over the Central Coast over the course of the weekend into early next week.
Computer models are showing a series of systems plowing into the Pacific Northwest over the 8-to-14-day time frame. It doesn't appear that any of these systems are capable of producing rainfall this far South however the proximity of the Central Coast to the storm path we'll keep temperatures down in the extended forecast likely below average.
