Season’s first storm brings more rain than expected to Modesto

The rainy season’s first storm soaked Modesto more than expected Monday but did not cause major problems.

The Modesto Irrigation District recorded 1.30 inches in its downtown gauge as of 9 p.m. That easily topped the record for the date – 0.73 inches in 1968 – and almost equaled the historical average of 1.33 inches for all of November, spokeswoman Melissa Williams said.

And it was a fairly cold storm, meaning snow in Sierra Nevada watersheds that have had four straight years of drought. Last year, the Northern San Joaquin Valley got about average rain, but little of the snow that provides most of the water for farms and cities.

“Very exciting to see snow on the ground!” said an email Monday from Katie Fromm, spokeswoman at the Dodge Ridge ski area near Pinecrest. “We are ready to open on a moment’s notice.”

Dodge has endured two very short seasons in a row but is counting on El Niño to turn things around. It is a warming in the eastern Pacific Ocean that often brings above-average rain and snow to California, and forecasters say a strong one is likely this winter. Dodge opened on Nov. 12 in 1982, a big El Niño year.

The National Weather Service forecast more wet weather Monday night, then a mostly sunny Election Day and the same through the weekend. Highs in Modesto could return to the low 70s by Saturday.

Don Pedro Reservoir on the Tuolumne River, the main storage for MID and the Turlock Irrigation District, is at about a third of capacity. New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River, whose users include the Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts, is at 11 percent.

Authorities reported a few traffic accidents in Monday’s rain, which also caused minor flooding along city streets with poor storm drainage. MID and TID did not report any outages for their power customers.

The rain far exceeded the 0.25 to 0.5 inches that the Weather Service had predicted over the weekend for Modesto.

The rainy season officially starts July 1, but most of the moisture tends to come from December through March, with smaller amounts in fall and spring.

Monday’s storm closed Highway 108 about 26 miles east of Strawberry and Highway 120 at Crane Flat in Yosemite National Park.

This story was originally published November 2, 2015 at 7:52 AM with the headline "Season’s first storm brings more rain than expected to Modesto."