So far, Southern California has not seen the back-to-back deluges highly anticipated with this year’s strong El Niño. Last Sunday’s storm dumped snow on the Sierra and thrashed Southern California with high winds, but Ventura County’s lower-lying communities got less than a half-inch of rain.

The county’s total rainfall to date this season is still below 60 percent of normal. But don’t lose confidence in El Niño yet. Curt Kaplan, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Oxnard office, said, “We still have a very strong El Niño set up in the Pacific … and it’s still encouraging. We’ll see quite a few storms come through between now and the end of March and even April.”

When it comes to California, water always seems to be in the news.

The problems of having too much — rarely. More often the problems of having too little. Maybe it’s about where to get it or where to store it? Even how to protect us from it. Frequently in some form or another, whether it be snowpack or drought or flooding, water is on our minds.

While northern Santa Barbara County still hasn’t seen the heavy rainfall forecast for the El Nino weather phenomenon, the region could certainly get wetter as the historically wetter months approach.
“I wouldn’t call El Nino a bust until at least April,” said John Lindsey, Diablo Canyon Power Plant marine meteorologist.

All indicators point toward heavy rainfall this month and in March, which Lindsey said are typically when northern Santa Barbara County sees the heaviest rainfall.

The U.S. Drought Monitor says exceptional drought was reduced in one area of the northern Sierra this week, “despite heavy precipitation and rebounding stream flows in the short term the past few weeks.”

“It was decided to hold off on making substantial changes to the depiction in the far West until next week,” according to the weekly report. “This is because it takes time to assess the impacts all this moisture will have on long-term deficits and other hydrological considerations. The only change made this week was in the northern Sierra of California (El Dorado County), where the coverage of exceptional drought was reduced.”

Even in the midst of the recent El Niño storm systems, environmentalists and vineyardists are still concerned with the impacts of four years of continued drought on crops.

Yet a recent analysis of the effectiveness of water penetration — using soil moisture-monitoring instrumentation — has shown that using a deep root irrigation system can save as much as 50 percent of water usage, according to a recent report by Angwin company Deep Root Irrigation.