This winter has been one of the wettest and snowiest on record for California, but what caused so many storms to slam into the state?
The weather pattern this winter has been very beneficial for the exceptional, multi-year drought that has plagued the state, filling water reservoirs and almost completely eliminating the drought in just a few short months.
“It has been a very interesting winter across most of the United States with very stormy and chilly weather in the West,” AccuWeather Long-Range Forecaster Jack Boston said.
The beneficial moisture came as a surprise to the public due to the development of a weak La Niña, a phenomenon that usually results in a drier-than-normal winter across California.
La Niña occurs when ocean water temperature are below normal across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator. This is the counterpart to El Niño, which typically favors wetter-than-normal weather across California.
However, there are many other phenomena that occur that can influence the global weather pattern besides La Niña or El Niño.
“The main reason for the persistent, excessive drought-busting rains in California appears to be unrelated to any affects that La Niña might have caused,” Boston said.
“The factor that has caused all of the storminess in California this season seems to be an unusual sea surface temperature distribution in the Pacific Ocean,” Boston said.
Boston explained that water temperatures across the northern Pacific Ocean were significantly lower than normal while water temperatures just south of Hawaii were well above average throughout much of the winter.
This unusually large, north-to-south contrast in water temperature influenced the jet stream, leading to a very active pattern that sent waves of storm systems directed at California, especially during January and February.
The jet stream is a fast river of air high in the atmosphere that is essentially the highway on which storm systems travel.
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