A Pacific Ocean storm system laden with much-needed moisture could bring long overdue rain to parts of California’s coast and interior by the week of Jan. 8, according to state meteorologists and climatologists.
“The [European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts] model is advertising a wet pattern next week, particularly across the burn areas of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties next Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 9 and Jan. 10,” John Lindsey, PG&E’s marine meteorologist at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, announced on social media on Jan. 2.
If the current weather models hold, the storm has a chance to deliver the state’s first significant amount of rainfall in the water year so far.
Since the most recent water year began on Oct. 1, 2017, California has seen a scant amount of rainfall, with the majority of the precipitation occurring in the northern part of the state. The rest of the state has been just short of bone dry.
Santa Maria only saw .12 inches of rain since Oct. 1 of last year, more than 4 inches less than the same time in the previous wet season, according to the National Weather Service. A “normal” year of rain for the city is around 4 inches, the agency said. Santa Barbara County’s rainfall and reservoir summary posted on Jan.1 had the current rainfall total for the city marked at .52 inches.
The picture for the rest of the county’s rainfall has been equally bleak. Buellton, Carpinteria, Cuyama, Goleta, Lompoc, Santa Barbara, and Santa Ynez all reported less than a half inch of rain since Sept. 1, or roughly 10 percent of what they would normally see in an average year.
The tepid start to the wet year is a sharp contrast to last year’s deluge of moisture, which ranked as the second wettest in 122 years of record keeping, according to data released by federal scientists.
Between October 2016 and March 2017, California averaged 30.75 inches of precipitation, the second-highest average since such records began being kept in 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It’s why California’s weather community is cautiously optimistic about the upcoming potential storm system.
“The rain [is] certainly a step in the right direction but [precipitation] would actually still be below average relative to what would fall on average over next 10 days,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote on Twitter on Jan. 2.
During the height of California’s most recent drought, Swain helped coin the term “ridiculously resilient ridge” pattern to describe the high-pressure system that parked over the state, effectively keeping it dry and pushing moisture to its north and south. In a post on his website, the California Weather Blog, on Dec. 24, Swain said a similar pattern was the culprit for the state’s recent dry spell but held off on calling this one the dreaded “triple r.”
“We’re not in the ‘triple r’ territory quite yet, but we’re getting close,” he wrote. “We have certainly witnessed the return of resilient riding near California, but I don’t think we’ve yet reached the ‘ridiculous’ level of multi-month persistence that occurred during the height of the recent California drought.”
Should present conditions persist through January and if seasonal precipitation has not started to recover from the year’s early deficit, however, Swain said, he “may have to revise” his current prognosis on the current wet season.
As for the storm due sometime between Jan. 9 and Jan. 10, Diablo Canyon’s Lindsey reminded his followers on Twitter and Facebook to temper their expectations.
“Remember, these are long-range models and are subject to great change,” he wrote.
This article appears in Jan 4-11, 2018.