California Has Already Had More Rain This Winter than Previous 12 Months

The State of California has had more rain this winter than in the previous 12 months, according to the National Weather Service.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday:

More precipitation has fallen on California during its current “water year” than in the full prior 12-month span, the National Weather Service says.

The downpours and mountain storms of recent weeks have helped boost the state’s precipitation volume to 33.9 trillion gallons thus far for the water year that began Oct. 1, compared to the previous water year’s 33.6 trillion gallons, the service said Sunday. Lake Tahoe by comparison contains roughly 40 trillion gallons. The water year refers to 12 months of precipitation that falls starting Oct. 1, through Sept. 30.

That means California’s water year is off to a decent start, meteorologists say, thanks to the atmospheric river that battered the northern part of the state in October and the relatively wet December.

Yet while much of the state and Bay Area have now emerged from the most severe drought conditions, the state’s rain and record snowfall in the last two months was not enough to see full drought relief, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The state still needs much more rain and snow to have a hope of breaking the two-year drought that threatens water supplies throughout California.

Northern California, which is usually rainier than the state’s southern half, will experience rain today and tomorrow, but none is forecast for the following week, according to Accuweather.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.