Front Likely to Move Into Area Today : Weather: Tropical storm may bring up to two or three inches of moisture to mountain regions, and from half an inch to an inch in coastal areas.

Weather forecasters predicted a wet weekend for Ventura County as a moisture-laden tropical storm began moving into the region from Hawaii Friday night.

“It will be soggy, soggy, soggy,” said James McCutcheon, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts for The Times.

It’s a relatively warm storm system, born over the mid-Pacific near Hawaii, so there won’t be the sort of mountain snowfalls associated with the chilly systems that often arrive later in the fall from the Gulf of Alaska, officials said.

McCutcheon said the large stream of subtropical moisture was being pulled into the Southland by winds circulating counterclockwise around another, smaller storm system to the north. Rain should start falling before dawn today, he said.

The National Weather Service in Oxnard pegged the chance of rain at 70% for today, tapering off to mostly dry but partly cloudy conditions Sunday, meteorologist Gary Neumann said.

Mountain areas were expected to bear the brunt of the storm with up to two or three inches of rain, Neumann said. Predictions for coastal areas ranged from half an inch to an inch of rain.

Neumann said to expect low temperatures in the 50s and 60s with daytime highs in the upper 60s along the coast to the low 80s inland.

But he cautioned that forecasting precisely when a tropical storm will move through Ventura County is an inexact science. “We could be off by six, 12, 18 hours,” Neumann said.

The storm could stall off the coast and gather more moisture before moving inland, he said.

“Most of the rain should come Saturday night, but then again it could be Sunday morning,” Neumann said. “The timing on these is hard.”

Forecasters said it will be mostly sunny Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, except for some fog and low clouds along the coast in the late night and early morning.

Temperatures are expected to increase gradually during the early part of next week, McCutcheon said.

“I expect a warming and drying trend that will last through next week,” McCutcheon said.

A weaker storm system last Sunday night and early Monday surprised forecasters by dropping a significant amount of rain across Ventura County, ranging from 0.68 inch in Simi Valley to 0.28 inch in Oxnard.

Meteorologists said the significant early rain could spell a wetter-than-normal autumn. But they said no one can predict if the pattern will continue through the winter.