Faith in El Niño

The 16-day GFS forecasts are pretty optimistic about rain in northern California in December (but those forecasts are always optimistic). In the meantime, November will be a drier month than average in Sacramento.

Depressed by the lack of rain - we need it so bad - but Bill Patzert at JPL has deeper faith in El Niño:

The pool of warm water in the Pacific Ocean west of Peru is huge and very deep. “There’s been a tremendous distribution of heat, and that is definitely not going away” any time soon, said Bill Patzert, climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. “I’m quite optimistic that the entire state is going to get hosed.

"This El Niño is so dramatically large. It’s so intense. It’s hard to imagine that it won’t deliver," Patzert said.