Wind, rain take over the Las Vegas Valley
That spate of hot and sunny weather last week, which felt more like Easter than actual winter?
It’s gone, ended by those 30-mph-winds that blew into the Las Vegas Valley, darkening the skies like the Pacific Northwest on Friday and unleashing a quarter inch of rain.
Saturday’s forecast isn’t expected to be as wet, but a slight shower is expected and the skies will be dark, just not as dark, said Ryan Metzger, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas.
“The rain is going to be hit and miss on Saturday,” Metzger said of Saturday’s forecast. “It definitely won’t be as steady and concentrated as it was on Friday.”
That downpour, which occurred in the middle of the afternoon, brought motorists to a crawl on many of the highways around Las Vegas, but the good news is no mud slides were reported on Mount Charleston in the vicinity of last year’s Carpenter 1 fire.
And that’s a good thing, considering nearly two inches fell up on the mountain, not exactly an ideal situation for an area already susceptible to erosion, Metzger said.
And as it turns out Friday’s quarter-inch rainfall wasn’t that out of the ordinary for this time of year, Metzger said.
All told and tallied, the accumulation still fell woefully short of the record rainfall for Feb. 28: a half-inch of rain back in 2001 since records have been kept since 1937.
As for the temperatures, they are expected to be in the mid-60s until Tuesday, when temperatures in the 70s are expected.
Contact reporter Annalise Porter at aporter@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0391. Contact reporter Tom Ragan at tragan@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.
