California has been dealing with a drought for a few years now, but the recent rainfall that has reached many Californians. The result, allowed us to receive as much as 10 to 20 inches of rain and around 200 inches of snow! This paved the way for the state to head towards the right direction of getting out of this drought-alert due to the with the heavy flooding and turbulent rivers.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center issues seasonal forecasts of precipitation and temperature for one to 13 months into the future. The CPC’s initial outlook for this winter favored below-normal precipitation in Southern California and did not lean toward either drier- or wetter-than-normal conditions in Northern California.
According to the Washington Post, “after a series of intense moisture-laden storms…most of California has seen rainfall totals 200 to 600 percent above normal over the past month, with 24 trillion gallons of water having fallen in the state since late December.”
The comparison between the amount of heavy rainfall-weeks and and the CPC’s seasonal raining season outlook prediction haven’t been consistent. It really puts the “unreliability of seasonal forecasts,” in California.
Experts say that seasonal precipitation outlooks should be viewed with caution, and not interpreted as weather forecasts since in California, due to their difficult and savage yearly-climate swings between dry and wet weather conditions and with the aftermath of climate change, it “has made the task even more complicated, because historical experience may no longer be a useful guide for estimating the severity of droughts and floods.”