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Now that 2016 has gotten off to a wet start, with a series of El Niño storms drenching California in recent days, the question is turning up with increasing frequency at dinner parties and coffee shops:

 

“How will we know when the drought is over?”

 

The answer, water experts say, is more complicated than you’d think.

 

Simply put: The drought could end this year, according to state water officials. But for that to happen, as California enters the fifth year of the worst drought in the state’s history, rains will have to continue arriving in pounding, relentless waves through April to fill depleted reservoirs and dry rivers and push the Sierra snowpack to at least 150 percent of normal.

The drought in California has been going on for five years now. But if you’ve turned on the TV recently, or, for that matter, if you live in California, you may have noticed it’s raining there – a lot.

 

The storms this past week are fueled by an El Nino, which is essentially a temperature change in the Pacific that has brought unseasonably warm temperatures to much of the country and a whole lot of precipitation, especially in Southern and central California. The question is – what difference does any of this rain make to California’s historic drought?

To the untrained eye the three images looked practically they same. They showed the El Niño pattern from 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

The first two brought crazy weather to Northern California and Northern Nevada. It’s usually the first quarter of the year where the moisture really starts to fall.

 

“So far we’ve got out of this event exactly what we expected,” Sasha Gershunov, climate and meteorology researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, said of this winter’s weather phenomenon.