Two years ago, media outlets were headlining strident messages that California had moved into a “megadrought” and that there was little hope for relief.
Story after story claimed that global warming had permanently changed the situation and that California’s reservoirs would remain unfilled.
Fast forward two years and these apocalyptic warnings appear more like a rendition of chicken-little than reliable climate science.
Massive rainfall has hit the Golden State, while we in the Northwest are enjoying a warmer-than-normal winter with less snowpack than normal.
Below is the percent of average precipitation for the last month over the western U.S. Some parts of California have received over 400% of normal!
To illustrate the soggy California situation, below is the accumulated precipitation at Los Angeles since October 1 (the current water year). Brown indicates normal values. LA is now running about 40% above normal
Compare this to Seattle (below). We are slightly above normal. Precipitation-wise we running nearly exactly on climatology. That may surprise some.
As I have described in several previous blogs, we are now experiencing El Nino conditions, which tend to make California very wet, while our area generally experiences near-normal precipitation.
The latest forecast of accumulated precipitation through Tuesday shows a continuation of the pattern with heavy precipitation expected in California. And yes….only modest precipitation over Washington. Oregon enjoys a piece of this wet bounty.
The origin of this wet situation is a strong El Nino low center off of Califonia, illustrated by the upper level (500-hPa pressure, about 18,000 ft) at 10 PM on Monday. The purple shading indicates an unusually strong low. I am getting tired of this pattern.
The current extended prediction of accumulated precipitation through April 1 by the European Center model suggests this pattern is not going away, with very wet conditions over California, but drier than normal in the Washington Cascades (see below).
But what about the Northwest snowpack during the next few months? I will leave that to an upcoming blog.
