Powerful winter storm

As I've been saying for a week now, a powerful winter storm is bearing down in Southern California. The satellite imagery shows a brand new surface low forming a few hundred kilometers west of Pt. Conception, this morning:

View fullsize

As the image below shows, Southern California has just entered a period of favorable upper-level diffluence associated with a strong jet streak that dropped south throughout the night:

View fullsize

Model indications are for a period of moderate to heavy rain to spread into the region beginning around 8 am and continuing for 4-8 hours, tapering off in the evening. The official forecast calls for between 1 and 2" of rain. If downtown Los Angeles received 1.4" before midnight, we will match the total from January 1998 :)

View fullsize

Radar indicates moderate to heavy rain already moving in to the Central Coast, with SLO already having gotten 0.36" of rain in the past 3 hours:

View fullsize