Despite forecasts of heavy rain and possible flooding in the coming days, state water managers are warning that the “snow drought” in California’s Sierra Nevada could remain for the rest of the winter and into the spring.
The water content of California’s mountain snowpack was just over half of the normal average on Tuesday, a modest increase from Jan. 1 but still far below the usual, state officials said.
Southern California may have just experienced a historic amount of rainfall, but more extreme precipitation is headed toward the region. More than a month’s worth of rain fell in a span of three hours in San Diego on Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
For the second time in a month, torrential flooding returned to Southern California this week with El Niño-fueled rains rolling in off the Pacific Ocean. This time San Diego felt the punch. The city, known for weather “the closest thing to perfect in America,” experienced one of its wettest days on record.
Weather officials had been warning Californians about the wrath of El Niño for months — even as some residents had begun to think the typically soaking climate pattern had gone AWOL.
San Diego’s dangerous flash flood on Monday may not be the state’s last such event of the next couple of weeks, as a weather pattern favorable to atmospheric rivers takes shape across the Pacific Ocean.
As California’s traditional season for rain and snow began last fall, meteorologists and hydrologists predicted that the state would probably experience a second year of heavy precipitation.
El Niño is here, but California isn’t seeing the impact, at least not yet. Joe Sirard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Los Angeles, says precipitation for the current water year is generally lagging behind averages.
The National Weather Service modeling predicts a “historically strong” El Niño this winter, the first in five years. What does that mean for gardens? A warm winter and usually, rain.
In the minds of many Californians, El Niño has long loomed as a rainmaker of epic proportions. In 1982-83, the Pacific climate pattern caused storms that pounded the state’s shoreline, damaging 1,000 homes between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border and washing the tip of the Santa Monica Pier out to sea.
