Modesto area got zero rain in January. Are we still in an above-average winter?
January brought zero rain to the Modesto area, after a two-month stretch with abundant storms.
This whipsaw of a winter still has about two months left, so California has a chance of easing its two-year drought.
The downtown gauge of the Modesto Irrigation District last got rain Dec. 29, when it recorded 0.09 inches. The season total had reached nearly 9 inches by that point. An average storm season brings 12.14 inches, mainly from November through March.
More crucially to the water supply, the snowpack in the central Sierra Nevada had stood at about 160% of average as December ended. It was at 94% Monday, the California Department of Water Resources reported.
MID and the Turlock Irrigation District, which both use the Tuolumne River, are several weeks from deciding whether customers will be cut back. They delivered about 80% of their usual amounts last year, a mild reduction compared to the zero allotments in parts of the San Joaquin Valley.
The storm season began with heavy rain and snow in late October, followed by a mostly dry November and a very wet December. The dry spell will persist at least until mid-February, the National Weather Service forecast.
“This is the thing that a lot of us had feared,” Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Lab, told the San Jose Mercury-News. “After those wonderful storms in December, the faucet just turned off. Whenever we were asked if those storms would end the drought, we said, ‘Yes, if we keep getting precipitation.’ But so far, we haven’t.”
Extremes from wet to dry
MID and TID are in fairly good shape thanks to storage in Don Pedro Reservoir and senior water rights. The same goes for the Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts on the Stanislaus River.
Last year, many districts in the west Valley got zero water from the federal Central Valley Project. A few got 75% of their contracted amount because of senior rights. The CVP has not set its 2022 allotments.
Many water experts say climate change has brought more extreme swings between drought and wet spells. The Tuolumne watershed had the most runoff on record in 2017, which followed a five-year drought.
That trend prompted MID and TID to apply for new water rights for the first time since the 1951 filing that led to Don Pedro’s construction. Both of their boards took the action Jan. 25 in the belief that even this huge reservoir will fall short in the future.
January 2021 was very wet
January brings an average of 2.37 inches of rain to Modesto and is typically the wettest month in MID records back to 1888.
The month went to another extreme last year: Modesto had a total of 5.44 inches on Jan. 27-28. The season ended with just 9.4 inches because other months were mostly dry.
January 2022 missed out on storms because of a ridge of high pressure over the Pacific Coast, the Weather Service said.
“It’s typical for us to have a dry period in the winter, but this is definitely longer than we normally have,” meteorologist Roger Gass told the Mercury-News.
