Well, that was an interesting storm! A tight, powerful system that came from the north and moved down the coast. The 2025-26 water year has already started (October 1st), but the rainy season in Sacramento rarely starts before November 1st, so this storm is almost like a freebie.
At Sacramento Executive Airport, we got 1.57 inches of rain, on a par with the larger storms that typically come in the winter. It's surprising that the valley got as much rain as it did. We're at the bottom of the valley. Elevation doesn't help us at all, but the storm persistently wrapped the rain around the low and kept us wet anyway.
I was surprised by the relatively-lower rainfall amounts immediately northeast of Sacramento and in the foothills northeast of the city. Carmichael got 0.95 inches, Colfax got roughly 0.84 inches, and Grass Valley got only 0.63 inches. Winds were frequently from the east in those areas as the storm slid south, however. Thus, there wasn't much help from orographic uplift, so totals suffered.
Davis and Woodland got roughly 1.1 - 1.2 inches.
Mountainous areas northeast of Fresno and Bakersfield, and north of Ventura, Los Angeles, and Rancho Cucamonga got clobbered, with upwards of 3 inches of rain.
There was an intriguing paper out of the University of Arizona a few years ago showing that response of the California rainy season to global warming has been to focus the rainy season into a short span of time. So, instead of rain spaced evenly out over five months you get four dry months and one really wet month, and God forbid if it doesn't rain that one month! We'll see if that's the pattern we get this winter.
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