Month’s Rains Swamp Most Years’ January Figures

What has felt like an especially wet January in California isn’t an effect of people becoming accustomed to the past half decade of drought. It really has been an exceptionally soaking month. San Francisco is experiencing the seventh-wettest January on record to date, according to the National Weather Service, and it’s nipping at the heels of January 1982, when a historic El Niño caused major flooding in California. “The storms have been one after the other,” said Anna Schneider, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Monterey office.