A cooler pattern to close out April in Southern California: showers, clouds and dropping temperatures

A cool, wet weather pattern is developing across Southern California, with a deep marine layer bringing clouds and light precipitation to the region early Monday, as well as a drop in temperatures that will persist through the week.

“We’re going to have well below normal temperatures over the next couple days,” said Ariel Cohen, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard. “It will be pretty cool ... quite chilly to close out April.”

In general, the highs through at least Wednesday are expected to be 5 to 10 degrees below seasonal averages, Cohen said. Along the coast, temperatures will likely remain in the 50s; inland valleys will top out in the 60s; and in the mountains, highs could stay in the 40s.

This weather pattern will also bring some sporadic precipitation to the region, but Cohen said if an area gets rain — and he said many places won’t — totals for the week aren’t expected to surpass one-tenth of an inch.

“We’re not looking for any serious rain,” Cohen said. It will be a “patchy drizzle, on-and-off” through at least Wednesday, and maybe into Thursday, driven by that marine layer.

There will be a slight chance for showers Thursday through Saturday, offshoots from a stream of storms that will mostly take aim further east, the meteorologist said.

“We’ll be getting — at most — a couple light showers, but the real impacts will be over the Great Plains of the U.S.,” Cohen said. “Most areas [here] probably won’t be getting a whole lot of anything.”

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center has forecast that below average temperatures are likely to persist in Southern California through at least May 1, with a chance for slightly above-average precipitation. The long-range forecast for May doesn’t shows further atypical temperatures or rainfall — highs are forecast to creep back up and rain should become infrequent.