For the past year, everyone has been talking about the California drought. While the locals are worried about browning lawns and further water restrictions, the rest of the United States is keeping an eye on the price of groceries as the drought impacts California farmers. Forest fires have also been raging wild across the state due to the abundance of dried out tinder. One such fire even jumped Interstate 15, igniting cars in traffic. However, the tropical activity this summer brought a turn of events for the arid state.
#ICYMI Just because CA is in a drought, doesn't mean we can stop worrying about floods. http://t.co/g5OJmocC3e pic.twitter.com/nsD2pe1UoG
— Our Bay on the Brink (@SFBayontheBrink) July 27, 2015
Numerous tropical and extratropical systems developed in the Pacific this summer and although not all made landfall, they provided a plume of moisture and heavy rainfall for the Southwest U.S. Although this should be a good thing, the exceptionally dry soil in place caused a majority of the rain to run off instead of being absorbed into the ground. As a result, mudslides washed away homes, bridges collapsed, and motorists were stranded on busy, flooded highways. In fact, the same area of Interstate 15 impacted by wildfires found itself under mudslides just two days later!
So just how much rain did southern California recieve? Well, San Diego, CA received 1.71 inches of rain for the month of July. While it may not seem like much, to put this into perspective, the sum of July rainfall from 1914 to 2014 totals 1.68 inches. That's 100 years of July total rainfall in one July! Los Angeles International Airport topped out at 0.35 inches of rainfall for the month when its average July rainfall falls at just 0.03 inches!
Despite this rainfall, the drought has actually worsened in southeastern California. The help from these tropical systems was not enough to even make a dent in its drought index. Perhaps a strengthening El Nino could help press additional and more frequent systems into the area this winter and aid in alliviating drought conditions. However, keep in mind that this drought was years in the making and did not happen overnight. It will take a consistently wet pattern to lift California out of the hole it was forcefully dug into.
Image courtesy of the National Weather Service in Hanford, California.
