SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Even after last week’s atmospheric river storm, San Diego’s water year has a dryness problem.
For a start, the water year runs from October 1 to September 30 of the following year. It’s different from the calendar year, but provides a way to keep track of rainfall without breaking up the winter.
According to the National Weather Service, San Diego has usually accumulated 6.03” of rain by this point in the water year. But since ours started back in October, San Diego has received just 1.27” so far at the airport. More than half of that came from last week’s storm
That means we still have a huge gap, called a deficit, of almost 5” of rain! So even though the recent storm helped us make some progress, we’re still drier than usual since we barely saw any rain from last July to this past January.
That dryness contributes to the drought. According to the US Drought Monitor, we’re still suffering from severe drought for 100% of San Diego County and 21% of the state.
Severe drought can cause problems with water supply, agriculture, and wildfires.
But here’s the catch: The drought monitor updates every Thursday, so current stats don’t include anything from this past storm. So when the next update comes Thursday, we’ll likely see improvement.
So what comes next? We’re still in a La Niña winter, which means we could be drier than usual in Southern California. The National Weather Service’s seasonal outlook predicts we’ll be abnormally dry too.
But this isn’t as big a problem as you might think.
The weather doesn’t always follow long-term forecasts like seasonal outlooks and La Niña trends. In fact, we’ve had several extremely rainy winters during weak La Niña patterns.
This time around, La Niña appears to be weak. And when weather conditions pop up, anything is possible.
Even better, the San Diego County Water Authority says we have more than enough water to handle anything this water year throws at us.
More rain would be great for San Diego … but in the meantime, it looks like we’ll be just fine.
