Dear WeatherCat extreme weather watchers,
Here is today's National Weather Service warnings from the Monterey (San Francisco) office:
Note the huge swath of light green "Flood Warning." Instead of snowing in the Sierras, it is literally raining hard in the very place we need snow to accumulate. What little snow was up there certainly has been diminished.
Worse still, it is raining so hard that we are getting flooding in places like Sacramento. As a result, the dams which store our water are forced to release in order to cope with the water that is still coming.
We have picked up over 2" of rain from this storm and it is still coming. On paper, I have almost 80% of the normal rainfall for January. But all that water is racing back to the Pacific. The only good thing about it is that we don't have to water. Between the diminished snow pack and the reservoir releases we are actually going to end up with less water as a result of this storm!
Colder storms are expected later this week. We might recover some of that snow. But thus far, this storm has been very good at only one thing - doing harm!
So far the house hasn't suffered any significant damage, but I had to run around to make several rain-related fixes.
Even in drought-parched California, there is such a thing as too much rain!
Oh well, . . . . .Edouard