Rain and Snow Hit’s Parts of California in First Storm of Water Year

Rain and Snow Hit’s Parts of California in First Storm of Water Year

Patrick Cavanaugh
Patrick Cavanaugh
Some rain and snow may have hit the parts of the Valley over the last few days. It's an unusual first storm of the season, especially in the La Nina year.

Getting rain this time of year is great for tree nut growers, because they may have cover crops and need to irrigate, our pre-emergent herbicides, that they need to activate. Steve Johnson is a private weather consultant based in Fresno. He explained what La Nina really is.

“The definition of La Nina of not having a lot of rainfall is a generality that I don't think is that accurate,” said Johnson.

Johnson said some La Nina years at produced a lot of rain. “There have been some La Nina’s in past climatological history that produced some of the nastiest floods in California history,” Johnson said.

But Johnson said many La Nina’s do generally point to less rain “For the most part is true. There are generally cooler because we have high pressure built up into Alaska that are blocking storm passages into California,” noted Johnson. But every once in a while, an odd ball situation happens, and that is where you get an undercutting event coming underneath the high-pressure ridge, just slips into California and brings a ton of rain and flooding,” Johnson said.

The recent storm in California helped with the fires and put some snow in the mountains.

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