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.”