COUNTYWIDE : As Area Warms Up, Rain Expected to Hold

After what forecasters said would be one of the chilliest nights, warmer weather was expected today, with clouds and showers believed to be holding off until Wednesday at the earliest.

Nevertheless, temperatures tonight are expected to dip as low as 40 in some places and even lower in the inland valleys, where freezing temperatures were in the forecast for Monday night, said Robb Kaczmarek, a forecaster with WeatherData Inc., which provides weather information to The Times.

Frost, however, shouldn’t be a factor today. Temperatures Monday night had been expected to be about 40 in most places.

Temperatures are expected to climb back into the 50s and 60s Wednesday and Thursday and remain at that level through the week, Kaczmarek said.

Despite chilliness in the evenings, Orange County has barely resembled last winter.

In fact, the weather has been so delectably calm in Laguna Beach--a frequent target during the winter-storm season--that Mark Baker, the battalion chief of the city’s Fire Department, labeled this year’s sprinkles “a major non-event.”

“It’s watered the plants, and that’s about it,” Baker said Monday. “We’ve not been hit at all. It’s been extremely mild. No major storm cells have settled over the city, and we’ve had minimal runoff. We also have much more significant vegetation growth, which limits the runoff even more.”

Not just in Laguna Beach, but throughout the county, the weather pattern has been pleasantly predictable, which Baker and others call a welcome relief from what happened a year ago.

Rainfall totals alone reflect the gaping disparity between this season’s weather and that of 1995, when Orange County was deluged with record rain.

For instance, on Jan. 4 of last year, more than six inches of rain fell in a two-hour period during evening rush hour, sending flood waters roaring through swollen creek beds and stranding hundreds of motorists on area freeways.

Like the fiscal year, rainfall is measured from July 1 to June 30. Normally, 5.9 inches of rain would have fallen from July 1 to today, but so far this season, the reading is only 2.17 inches, Kaczmarek said.

Last season, 13.02 inches of rain had fallen by late January, making it the wettest season since 1952, when rainfall totals were first recorded.

By 8 a.m. Monday, only two stations in the region reported more than an inch of rain, those being Laguna Niguel Lake (1.06 inches) and Oso Creek (1.14 inches).