Weather respite Sunday, after a record storm

The Bay Area will dry up, recover and dry up Sunday, following a powerful atmospheric river that slammed the area with rain and wind, killing one man in county floodwaters from Sonoma.

A drier low pressure system arrived on the heels of Friday’s storm, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Crystal Oudit. Sunday and Monday could bring a few inches of rain along the coast, but little rain inland.

On Saturday, cottony clouds drifted slowly across a cerulean sky, with intermittent sunshine. A narrow band of showers caused some minor flooding in the East Bay and North Bay, but the dramatic river atmosphere disappeared.

Gusts of wind downed trees and power lines in the Oakland hills, knocking out power to about 1,000 customers. In Los Altos, the Foothill Expressway was closed Saturday morning while a large fallen tree at the Loyola Bridge was cleared.

The atmospheric river, created by plumes of tropical moisture, broke records across a wide swath of northwest California, particularly in parts of Sonoma and Marin counties.

Santa Rosa experienced 12.45 inches of rain, marking its largest rainfall over a three-day period in recorded history. That’s about a third of the city’s annual average.

The National Weather Service calls it a 1-in-1,000-year event. Although no one has recorded any downpours in 1024, models calculate that there is only a 0.1% chance of that much rain.

Flooding claimed the life of a driver, who has not yet been identified, in western Sonoma County near the town of Rio Nido on the Russian River. Around 11:30 a.m. Saturday, a passerby called the sheriff’s office to report a vehicle in floodwaters near Mays Canyon Road and Highway 116, according to Officer Rob Dillion. Crews were able to recover the occupant of the vehicle, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

But the rains brought signs of life to the Bay Area’s dry streams. Chinook, or king, salmon were spotted Saturday swimming upstream to spawn in Los Gatos Creek. The life cycle of these precious fish takes them from their birth in Bay Area rivers to a downstream migration that deposits them in San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long. Their bodies adapt to salt water by migrating to the ocean, then they return to streams to spawn, usually three years later.

“After the first rain, the salmon reached Campbell Avenue,” near Los Gatos Creek Park, where they were seen jumping, said Mike Tamaro of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition.

This weekend also marked the start of rainbow season, with beautiful, multi-colored arches from across the Bay Area posted to social media sites. Rainbows are created by sunlight refracted by water droplets in a storm-drenched sky.