Febuary 22, 2005
By Charles F. Bostwick, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

What's wetter than San Francisco or even Seattle?

Los Angeles -- at least this winter -- which is headed for its second-rainiest season since 1877, when the National Weather Service began keeping records.

Rainfall as of Monday afternoon totaled 32.03 inches downtown, more than three times the normal through the date of 9.89 inches and bearing down on the annual record of 38.18 inches set in 1883-84.

"It is possible before the season is over that we'd even top the record," National Weather Service technician Bruce Rockwell said Monday.

Even average weather would give Los Angeles an additional 2.45 inches of rain in March and 1.04 inches in April.

That 1883-84 record was set with the help of 12.36 inches of rain in March and 3.58 in April, records show. By the end of February that year, Los Angeles had 20.5 inches of rain.

This season's rainfall to date has been exceeded only in 1889-90, when rain amounted to 33.91 inches by the end of February. Dry weather that March and April left the 1889-90 rain year No. 2 overall, at 34.84 inches.

Average rain in downtown since 1914, Weather Service statistics show, has been 14.75 inches a year.

Meanwhile, it's expected to be sunny today in Seattle.

Rainfall there since October has amounted to 15.7 inches -- two-thirds of normal -- and mountain snowpack is skimpy, leaving locals anxious about a repeat of the 2001 drought.

San Francisco has had about 19.5 inches, about 40 percent more than average but no record.

That's because February's storms have been steered away from Washington and Oregon by the jet stream: the storms picked up tropical moisture, then hit Southern California, said John Dlugoenski, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com.

This year has been labeled a light to moderate El Niño episode -- milder than the one that pounded California in 1997-98 -- but the recent storms have not followed the El Niño pattern of blowing east from Hawaii directly into the West Coast.

Instead, the storms started over the northern Pacific Ocean, then stayed offshore as they traveled southeast, Dlugoenski said. Picking up moisture off Central or even South America, they came ashore in Southern California, hammering the Southland but largely avoiding Central California and northward.

At Mammoth Mountain in the Eastern Sierra, for example, where snowpack generally is measured in feet, this latest storm dropped 26 inches of new snow. But Mountain High ski resort in the San Gabriel Mountains got 4 feet to 8 feet of snowfall.

"We started out with 3 to 5 feet and we had 4 to 8 feet on top of that," Mountain High spokesman John McColly said Monday, as snow continued to fall.

Recent storms aren't the heaviest Southern Californians have ever seen. Downtown Los Angeles got 2.18 inches Saturday and 1.88 Sunday, bringing rainfall so far this month to 7.58 inches.

Downtown's record one-day rainfall, set March 2, 1938, is 5.88 inches.

This year might break the 121-year-old rainfall record if weather patterns persist, Dlugoenski said.

"It seems like the wet pattern we've been in will continue, at least through March," Dlugoenski said. "At this point there's no sign the wet pattern is going to end anytime soon."

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