California is finally getting a wet winter
SAN FRANCISCO — Snowcapped mountains are pretty typical in California — just not the peaks that got dusted this week.
A series of storms has brought a rare wet winter to the state, sending snow levels plunging and creating some surreal scenes Californians won’t soon forget: Blankets of white covering vineyards in Napa Valley. Plows clearing Highway 17 between Santa Cruz and San Jose. Peaks in the San Francisco Bay Area with an alpine feel. Even San Francisco’s Twin Peaks got a light dusting.
The conditions highlight a season of storms that have left their mark from the Sierra Nevada range, from which one-third of California’s water supply originates, to Los Angeles, which has endured six dry winters out of its last seven. It’s a welcome turn of events for a state that is still recovering from severe drought.
By Tuesday, it was almost becoming too much of a good thing.
In the Sierra, as much as 10 feet of snow kept several ski resorts shuttered Tuesday. In Southern California, officials warned of snow levels dropping Wednesday to as low an elevation as 2,000 feet above sea level, which could shut down sections of interstates 5 and 15 as well as other mountain passes.
Big Bear and Wrightwood were poised to see as much as 3 to 4 inches of snowfall through Tuesday night, and up to 8 inches could fall at Mount Laguna in San Diego County.
This latest series of storms comes around the midpoint of California’s wet season.
“This is shaping up to be a wet year,” said Chris Orrock, spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources, citing atmospheric river events that gave the state a good three weeks of rain in January before a round of cold storms arrived at the start of February.
There are no guarantees, of course. But the preliminary outlook is that Tuesday’s storm was “just the first of several cold weather storms coming into California down from the Gulf of Alaska,” Orrock said. Another could hit the state later this week.
While Northern Californians are seeing a typically wet winter, the rain in Southern California has seemed more like an aberration. Downtown Los Angeles has received 12.91 inches
of rain since Oct. 1— that’s 167 percent above average for this time of year and close to the annual average of 14.93 inches.
It’s also a stark contrast from last winter— the thirddriest water year for downtown L.A. since record-keeping began in 1877. At this time last year, just 1.89 inches of rain had fallen since Oct. 1. Experts generally attributed the recent string of dry years to troublesome masses of high pressure that have blocked storms from dousing California during its brief wet season.
“What a contrast,” climatologist Bill Patzert said. “Here in Southern California, we’re way above the curve.”
Wet years have been notably scarce for Los Angeles in recent times. In the past two decades, 14 years have been
drier than normal. The last wetter-than-average water year was 2016-17, which culminated with then-Gov. Jerry Brown declaring an end to a punishing five-year drought.
The snowpack across the Sierra Nevada, California’s greatest mountain range and the state’s frozen reservoir of water, is 125 percent of average for a Feb. 5, and is 83 percent of the way to what’s typically the highest snowpack of the year, measured April 1.
The southern Sierra has been particularly blessed with extra snow, currently 133 percent above normal. The Tulare Basin has received more precipitation since Oct. 1 than it received in all of the last water year. And from Sunday through Monday morning, Orrock said, the Santa Barbara and Ventura areas received about 6 inches of rain.