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In This Issue...
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Environment
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Rain or No Rain? Forecasters Don't Know
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Rain or No Rain? Forecasters Don't Know
By Sarah Weston
With hopes running high that this will at last be the winter that breaks the drought, the recent strange weather has forecasters as well as residents wondering what to expect next. Oct. 13 brought a storm the likes of which had not been seen since 1962, yet two weeks later we once again faced wildfire conditions. Will it rain or won't it?
Hopes are pinned on the fact that this seems to be an El Niño year, though conditions are still developing.
"The rainfall forecast 90-day outlook for December, January and February is above normal for most of the state," said Rick Canepa of the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Monterey. "That does coincide with an El Niño year."
However, he cautioned that so far El Niño conditions have only been moderate, whichmeans it's hard to make predictions with certainty. He recalled the strong El Niño conditions in the winter of 1997-98.
"When they're of that magnitude chances are pretty high that it's going to turn out to be a wet winter," he said. "But even that season it took a while for the rains to get going. It wasn't until after the new year began that we started to get horrendous rains."
The Columbus Day storm of 1962 occurred in La Niña conditions, the opposite of El Niño (see sidebar), which simply means that such freak storms can happen at any time without being predictors of any trend.
Similarly, recent windy conditions are not necessarily indicators of what's in store this winter.
"It's been almost springlike, the way the winds have been behaving in the last few days," Canepa said on Oct. 29.
The winds that kicked up as crews battled the Loma Fire were the result of a strong storm system that had moved in from the northwest.
Unfortunately, that system did not bring the precipitation which would have helped extinguish the blaze.
"Those types of systems don't usually have much rain with them, because they're coming from a dry direction," Canepa said. "But because it was quite dynamic, it did stir up a lot of wind."
For the next week or so, the time frame his office is most comfortable predicting, Canepa saw a dry stable system with light winds, after which there was at least the chance of rain.
Beyond that, he said we'll just have to see how El Niño conditions develop.
"Historically, moderate El Niños don't really add up one way or the other in regards to precipitation," he said. "It could be above, it could be the same, it could be below normal. Being a moderate El Niño, there is still uncertainty as to how the winter will pan out."
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