On the central coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the storm dropped about 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain at Rocky Butte in San Luis Obispo County, the weather service said. Forecasters described it as a "cutoff low," a storm that is cut off from the general west-to-east flow and can linger for days, increasing the amount of rainfall. The storm swept through Northern California earlier in the week as the center of the low-pressure system slowly moved south off the coast.
"It will have an impact, but thankfully it's happening quite late," he said. Sven Dybdahl, owner of olive oil and vinegar store Viva Oliva in downtown Santa Barbara, said he was grateful that the weather came at the tail end of the holiday shopping season, otherwise he'd be worried about his store's bottom line. "In Oxnard, particularly, overnight there were downpours that preliminary data suggests were probably the heaviest downpours ever observed in that part of Southern California," climate scientist Daniel Swain, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an online briefing.