Sunny Skies Might Turn Cloudy by the Weekend

The weather for most of the rest of the holiday weekend probably won’t be quite as nice as it was on Thanksgiving, “but it still won’t be too shabby,” a meteorologist providing forecasts for The Times said Thursday.

Santa Ana winds rattled a lot of windows in Orange County late Wednesday night and Thursday morning, littering some streets and yards with tree limbs, palm fronds and garbage. The dry winds blowing off the northeastern deserts also kicked up whitecaps in Newport Bay and better-than-usual surf at beaches.

Wind advisories were issued for some canyons and passes in the county, and the Santa Ana Fire Department reported one minor roof fire Thursday morning that was fanned by the gusty winds.

While much of the Southland was spared serious wind damage, gusts up to 30 m.p.h. in the Malibu area knocked out power to about 400 customers before dawn on Thursday, according to the Southern California Edison Co. The power was restored by about 8 a.m.

Strong gusts were also reported in the San Fernando Valley and in the Newhall-Saugus-Valencia area of the Santa Clarita Valley.

The gusts, from winds circulating around a high-pressure system centered over Nevada on Thursday, were expected to diminish by this morning as the high is shoved eastward by the weekend storm system.

Today will be much like Thursday--sunny and bright, with high temperatures in Orange County near 70--according to Dan Bowman, a forecaster for WeatherData Inc., a meteorological firm based in Wichita, Kan.

But Bowman said that a storm system moving southeast out of the northern Pacific should bring partly cloudy skies to Southern California by Saturday and Sunday, with high temperatures dipping a few degrees into the 60s.

“The chance for rain here is pretty slim,” Bowman said. “There’ll be some in Northern California, but proably just in the extreme north.”

The storm system will move on to the east by Monday, intensifying as it passes over the colder terrain inland and bringing snow and rain to the Rockies, Bowman said.

While that will mean clearing skies here Monday morning, another storm system is expected to move in by Monday night, with a chance of showers by Tuesday morning.

“It’s a little early to tell about that one,” Bowman said, “but I wouldn’t expect it to be too dramatic.”

The high temperature in Santa Ana on Thursday was 72 degrees, just one degree above the normal high for Nov. 26 and 20 degrees below the 90-degree record for the date, set in 1903. Thursday’s Orange County low was 47, four degrees below normal and five degrees above the record low for the date, set in 1880.

The relative humidity, kept a little low Thursday by dry winds out of the northeast, ranged from a low of 17% to a high of 68%.

Times staff writer Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this article.