Small puddles form on a Santa Barbara city street Friday morning as light showers hit the area.
Small puddles form on a Santa Barbara city street Friday morning as light showers hit the area. Credit: Evelyn Spence / Noozhawk photo

Santa Barbara County residents planning to hit the streets for trick-or-treating on Saturday should expect to see rain in the late afternoon and evening, but exactly when it will hit is the million-dollar question, meteorologist Ryan Kittell told Noozhawk.

The county should expect to see on-and-off showers between Friday and Sunday, with roughly a quarter of an inch to three-quarters of an inch of rain most likely.

There’s a 10% to 20% chance those amounts could double, but there’s also a 10% to 20% chance rainfall totals could come out to half of what is projected.

On Halloween itself, trick-or-treaters should expect to see steadier rain by at least the middle part of Saturday evening, according to Kittell.

“Most of the time it won’t be raining, but splash-and-dash type (rain),” he said. “If you go trick-or-treating and don’t want to see rain, the earlier the better… Hope for no rain. Plan for it to be wet.”

Risk of significant flooding was low as of Friday morning.

The area already got splashed in the early hours of Friday.

Downtown Santa Barbara saw .44 inch of rain over a two-hour period, while other areas throughout the county saw up to a quarter of an inch of rain.

A low-pressure system is driving the rain over Southern California. National Weather Service‘s models are tracking a storm heading over Baja California.

There’s only a small chance it will move north toward Santa Barbara, Kittell said.

Expect to see temperatures in the mid-to-upper 60s on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with lows in the mid-50s.

A coastal flooding advisory was in effect through 2 p.m. Friday, with high tides expected to hit near noon on Friday. Earlier this week, 8-foot high tides broke records.

Check the latest forecast and weather-related alerts here.

— Noozhawk South County editor Evelyn Spence can be reached at espence@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.