Good morning and thank you so much for joining us today.

This is a special edition of the Situation Room.

I'm Kate Baldwin, in for Wolf and Pamela today.

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone.

We're following the weather today, for sure, a dangerous storm,

especially brewing over California. Overnight, take a look at some of this video. The

California coast started to see the effects of this massive storm with heavy winds and rain

and everything that it brought with it. As the system moves over Southern California,

it's the first time since early February

2024 that area is facing a high flood risk threat.

CNN meteorologist Alison Chinchara is tracking this one for us.

Allison, what's the latest here?

Yeah, that's right. So we take a look at the radar and again, you can kind of see all these boxes here on the map.

These indicate flash flood warnings.

This is because not only how much rain has already fallen on the ground in some of these spots, but in anticipation of even more.

Some of these locations could be looking at rainfall rates of at least an inch an hour, and it's going to be multiple hours of dealing with the rain.

As you can see just those last couple hours here on the radar, a lot of that heavy rain has really surged back into the state, not just in the southern portion, but also the central and northern portions of the state. But it's in the south where we're really focused on the biggest potential for flooding concerns. You can see we have the pink shaded area here that is a high risk. That's a level four out of four as high as it could possibly get in terms of flooding threats.

Tomorrow we also have a high threat, but it's only up around level three. The point in all of this is just to say that there is the potential for some significant flooding across these areas.

Because you'll notice we push this forward into Thursday, there's even more rain expected on Christmas Day and even as we head into Friday.

So you're just adding all of this rain, even though going forward most of these areas will likely only get an extra 1 to 3 inches.

It's on top of what they've already had. But some spots could still pick up an extra 4 to 6 inches of rain, meaning that a lot of these areas in total could be looking

at a foot of rain when all of this is said and done by the end of the week. And snowpack, especially

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