Gray Skies, Possible Sprinkles Forecast

San Diego can expect cloudy skies and a slight chance of showers today as yet another storm approaches, weather forecasters said.

It follows sporadic rain on Sunday as the southern fringe of a low pressure system moved through the area.

Rainfall amounts and wind speeds were far less than anticipated yesterday, mainly because the weather system moved farther north than expected, said forecaster Richard Stitt of the National Weather Service in San Diego.

“The most rain we got was .13 (of an inch) at Lemon Grove,” he said. “That low moved north of us, and we had absolutely no thunderstorm activity, hardly any gusty winds, and very low rain totals.”

Lindbergh Field had received .04 of an inch of rain by 4 p.m. Sunday.

The weekend’s showers brought the total rainfall for the month at the airport up to 1.29 inches, close to the normal 1.43 inches for February. The total for the season is 8.72 inches, 2.08 inches above the norm.

The clouds are expected to remain until Wednesday, when a new storm is due to hit the area.

“The trend will be for less and less chances of rain in San Diego over the next few weeks, mainly because it appears the storm tracts are going north and east of us,” Stitt said. “We’ll only be getting the southern fringes of these storms.”

The bands of showers generated more rain in the Los Angeles area than had been forecast. The storm is expected to dump about an inch of rain there before skies clear later today.

“Our computer models just do not do a good job on these kinds of storms,” said George McKillop, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Los Angeles. “A typical storm moves on, giving us rain one day in California and snow in the Rockies the next. It’s like if you toss a Frisbee into a creek, it flows downstream. That’s predictable. It’s called a ‘trough.’

“But this turned into what we call a ‘cutoff flow.’ It’s like the Frisbee got caught in an eddy and didn’t move. . . . You can’t always predict when that will happen.”

The most rainfall in Southern California was recorded atop Mt. Wilson, where 2.6 inches fell between 4 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday.

By Sunday afternoon, the system was about 300 miles off the Southern California coast and moving to the northeast.

The heaviest rainfall overnight was expected from Ventura County northward, the weather service said.

Snow levels in the Southern California mountains will be above 7,500 feet, which should not be of much help to ski resort operators.