High winds and heavy rains have pounded northern and central California, cutting off electricity, closing schools and disrupting airline flights in the region, all courtesy of a weather system dubbed "the Pineapple Express."
In that phenomenon, an "atmospheric river" of heavily moist air peels off from a larger such band in the waters adjacent to the Hawaiian Islands and heads toward the Pacific coast of North America.
The National Weather Service issued warnings of flash floods, high winds and high surf ahead of the current storm.
It also warned of mudslides the heavy rains could create beneath foothill areas stripped of their vegetation by wildfires around the state earlier this year.
Some areas of northern California got 5 inches of rain from Wednesday night into Thursday, and forecasts called for 4 inches in the Central Valley, the state's agricultural heartland.
"The fact that it looks like so much of it is going to fall in such a short period of time, that's one of the major concerns," U.S. Weather Service meteorologist Charles Bell said.
The heaviest rainfall was recorded in the state's Petrified Forest, which recorded 14.6 inches.
By late morning Thursday, San Francisco International Airport had cancelled more than 200 incoming and departing flights with many other flights experiencing delays of up to 2 hours.
Thousands of homes lost electricity, while in downtown San Francisco a subway station in the city's financial district lost power and had to be closed.
Around 227,000 customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, mostly living in the peninsula region south of San Francisco, were without power, the utility reported.
The storm is forecast to move into Southern California late Thursday and Friday; the region saw its first storm of the season last week with record amounts of rainfall, and a third storm system is expected to move into the area during the weekend.
While not enough to end the record-breaking multi-year drought plaguing California, the flurry of storms should bring some measure of mitigating relief, weather experts said.
As the storms move eastward in the state into the Sierra Nevada Mountains the rain will become snow, with blizzard conditions and 80 mph winds predicted in parts of the mountains.
The kinds of soakings the "Pineapple Express" can bring to California are rare, but they are also necessary as they bring as much as 50 percent of the state's annual rainfall, the National Weather Service says.
