The late-rainy-season storm that just blew through Sacramento produced more rain than I expected. The storm brought 1.71 inches to Sacramento Executive Airport. The slow-moving nature of the storm should mean less scatter than usual in rainfall amounts (I think the scatter on this map reflects that not all stations have fully-reported yet).
Despite the desperately-dry month of March (temperatures were above normal every single day from Feb. 23 to April 1), due to rainy November and December, we're about 94% of normal for rainfall for the 2025-26 rainy season in Sacramento. So, not too bad for northern California - we've seen worse. (According to a recent Univ. of Arizona paper, the California rainy season is increasingly becoming an intense one-month event, rather than something gentle.)
The biggest problem we have now in northern California is the absence of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which will complicate water deliveries in the summer. The Sierra snowpack problem is part of a much-more severe snowpack problem in the Great Basin and Southern Rockies. Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are likely to reach emergency lows this summer. It's been nice to know ya, Las Vegas and the Imperial Valley! (Maybe it's time to start sacrificing Colorado-River-Valley alfalfa irrigation.)
Normally, the rainy season runs from Nov. 1 - April 15, but today's weather forecasts are suggesting the southern branch of the jet stream will intensify, with rains in the mountains this weekend and another storm passing through Sacramento on Tuesday next week. So, the rainy season isn't quite dead yet. It would be excellent if it extended into May. We had the rainiest May on record in 2019, just seven years ago. Wouldn't it be great if we had another one? (Just dreaming - it's just hard sometimes to take that complete Californian six-month absence of rain, until November.)
