All that rain! Drought shows improvement in California

Well, all that rain is doing its thing in California, and we are not talking about the floods this time. The deluge is bringing some relief to the perpetual drought. Let’s remember that California has been in a drought for the last decade. Residents have been placed on strict water restrictions and the lack of H2O has really taken a toll on farmers and agriculture.

Since about mid-December California, and other western states have been battered by storm after storm. Many areas have already received well over 200% of their season’s average precipitation… and it is only January. There have been countless damage and unfortunately over a dozen deaths.

The drought relief is the silver lining. We know that it will take more storms, more rain, and much more snow to completely vanish the drought, but at least we are seeing some slight improvement this week.

The latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that the extreme drought that was affecting about 27% of California is no longer there. Now only less than 1% is under an extreme drought, this is just the extreme northern portion of the Golden State.

Zooming out a bit, Utah decimated its exceptional drought which affected about 2 percent of the central region of the state.

This week, at a national level, the drought decreased in all categories. This is great news as we still have a couple more months of the rainy season to squeeze out. Hopefully with a foreseeable pattern change, as La Niña seems to be weakening, there will be more rain on the horizon to continue to bring relief from the drought, especially across the West. Hopefully, it won’t be all at once. The best type of rain to help the drought is constantly light and prolonged episodes... think Northwest or London weather.