Now that rain has been removed from the weather discussion in the Bay Area, the only necessity for a return to postcard beauty in the region was for the wind to slow.

The National Weather Service said that residents should see wind speeds fall late Thursday and into today. Following that decline, they should plan to enjoy sun, nice temperatures and barely a breeze.

“You’ll see a shift in the offshore flow, and it’s gonna start warming up more,” NWS meteorologist Dial Hoang said. “Those temperatures by the weekend should be up to the mid-70s. Some of the hotter places might get near 80.”

The winds that blew Wednesday night came mostly from the west and northwest areas. On Thursday, they were flowing more from the northeast. Offshore winds are those gusts that blow from the land toward the Pacific Ocean, the opposite of the normal wind direction from the ocean that acts as the Bay Area’s natural cooling mechanism.

Thus, the windy conditions were likely to add warmth to the region Thursday rather than make it cooler, according to the weather service.

By noon Thursday, the weather service had recorded wind gusts of up to 39 mph in the eastern part of Contra Costa County, 30 mph in downtown San Francisco and 27 mph in San Jose. They gusted up to 20 mph in Livermore and 15 mph in Santa Cruz.

The weather service said those winds could intensify for a time before starting to calm down sometime late Thursday or early today.

“We are starting to move into a more springlike weather pattern,” Hoang said. “There are not a lot of signs of significant rainfall, at least through the middle of March. And we’re starting to see some of the warming trends that we start to get when spring gets here.”

Additionally, a high-pressure ridge that began to develop after the last of the Bay Area’s February storms has taken hold north of the region, causing oncoming storm systems from the Pacific Northwest to take a different path. Small pockets of light rain briefly fell in the most northern parts of California and in areas near Tahoe on Wednesday, and those areas are expected to remain cloudier and cooler than average through the weekend, the weather service said.

The temperatures also are expected to cool down in the Bay Area early next week, though Hoang said they are expected to remain above the seasonal average.