El Nino Done? (Sacramento, Folsom, Eureka: water bill, land, companies)

[ABrandNewWorld]

We could be into a long term warm epoch which means warmer and drier winters and more humid summers that are no longer completely void of rain (and warm rain is no longer an oxymoron to the state). Future rainfall will be more randomly distributed throughout the year rather than being concentrated only in winter. Wettest months of 2015 in San Diego were July and September!

Don't count March as the "end of the rainy season" but just the beginning of spring.
There could be some substantial rain in spring and even summer.


This could be the "new normal".

[expatCA]

Originally Posted by ABrandNewWorld

We could be into a long term warm epoch which means warmer and drier winters and more humid summers that are no longer completely void of rain (and warm rain is no longer an oxymoron to the state). Future rainfall will be more randomly distributed throughout the year rather than being concentrated only in winter. Wettest months of 2015 in San Diego were July and September!

Don't count March as the "end of the rainy season" but just the beginning of spring.
There could be some substantial rain in spring and even summer.


This could be the "new normal".

The weather is changing everywhere and there is no way to be sure what next month will bring let alone the balance of the year or next year. It will be interesting to say th least.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

NOAA Drought Page - what they lack in predictive climate models they make up for in current remote sensing:

California Home | U.S. Drought Portal

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by BayAreaHillbilly

NOAA Drought Page - what they lack in predictive climate models they make up for in current remote sensing:

California Home | U.S. Drought Portal

Wow. According to that, even the far north coast is in a mild drought (rated: "anomaly dry"). That really gives one pause. People who think they can move to Humboldt or Crescent City to avoid the drought could be disappointed. Or maybe the north coast's "anomaly dry" will end up looking like what the norm for the Bay Area was 30 years ago. It's all relative.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by HockeyMac18

Out of curiosity, is this a normal amount of time between oscillations from warm to cold water in the Pacific? I'm not super familiar with that aspect of the El Nino/La Nina cycles, but I naively thought El Nino's had longer periods of effects than this one did.

The ENSO periodicity is seemingly pretty normal. They have records showing this going back a ways at NOAA although records become a bit suspect prior to the 1970s.

The other point is, ENSO is not the be all and end all.

There is also PDO (longer period / lower frequency). There is substantial evidence that PDO modulates ENSO. Overall, the smoothed PDO signal has been in negative territory for 10 - 17 years depending how you smooth and what is used as a baseline. PDO is tough to characterize since it's only been known since the 1990s.

There are attempts to derive proxy based records of these oscillations, YMMV.

The unknown unknown is what sorts of even longer period / lower frequency oscillations are there?

When we look at the paleo climate evidence of past megadroughts (as well as the shorter pluvials), it's pretty hard to explain them without the existence of some very low frequency oscillations being present.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by MtnSurfer

So... this effects El Nino for CA how, exactly? And more importantly, do forecasters think this effect will continue to diminish the remainder of our Winter rain opportunities? Obviously, February has been disappointing after the big rains earlier in the season.

Derek

That bolt of cold water will not be helpful to precipitation in California. It will lower SST off our coast.

[MountainHi]

Originally Posted by MtnSurfer

So... this effects El Nino for CA how, exactly? And more importantly, do forecasters think this effect will continue to diminish the remainder of our Winter rain opportunities? Obviously, February has been disappointing after the big rains earlier in the season.

Derek

It means El Nino is almost over.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

The extended shows nothing through the end of the month, with the exception of a sliver of the North Coast (e.g. from Sonoma County Line north). Even there, we are talking about very light events, bringing minuscule amounts.

This will go down as another disastrously dry February. Bad mojo given how important Feb accumulations are each water year.

[sourdough]

Ok, so the drought will continue. Are you ready for the move….
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q...ught+migration
I know where I'm going.

[Valley Native]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

In my observation, the El Nino effects did arrive. They're just skirting CA to a great extent, due to a stubborn high pressure front over the state. Even so, rain has got through, it's been raining in the Bay Area, and snowfall in the Sierras is at a good level. El Nino hit the NW in a big way last November like a typhoon, and has been prolific there. I don't know about points south of CA.

The rain and snow in northern CA was simply a part of the normal winter storm cycle, and really has little or nothing to do with El Niño. It wasn't excessively wet at all ... although in January it might have seemed a little bit that way in comparison to string of excessively dry winters during the past few years.

The bulk of moisture in the Pacific NW is all the more proof that NOAA was way off base in their long range outlooks. They were saying that California and the SW would be inundated with moisture this winter, and the Pacific NW would be drier than normal. They predicted pretty much the same thing for last winter also ... so they turned out to be dead wrong for two years in a row (which is not the first time this has happened)!