Way to rain on our parade.

There is snow in the hills this winter, there was very little last January. Our water comes out of the Sierra, so all that snow is good for us.

Did the rainfall season change? Is it now from October 1st through September 30th of the following year? That happened to the rainy season from July 1st through June 30th of the following year? That is when I thought the rain year was when they measured precipitation for that 12 month period?

Did someone change the yearly rainfall months?

Now remember on December 11th of 2014 that is when most areas received over 4" of rain that day.

Yeah, but last year the issue wasn't rain from Oct - Dec. The problem was that last Jan - Mar had pretty much ZERO rainfall. If the rain continues as it has, it could be decent year. It's better to get the rain in reasonable amounts on a regular basis like we have this year as opposed to the deluges we got last year.

For plants and animals it's much better when the rainfall comes in multiple deliveries rather than in a single storm, because the single storm just creates a big runoff. So, by anyone's standards, the fall/winter of 2016 is *not* the beginnning of a drought year thus far, but rather a normal, wet winter just like we ought to have it. Last year, all that rain came in a single storm just before xmas, so it did very little for drought relief, but this year it's been a series of reasonably sized storms. And if you look at the Sierra Nevada, it's not a drought year either thus far: there's a very nice snow pack at this point - the season started strong, we had not seen this much snow since 2011. It just needs to keep going. The forecast for this week suggests it does, btw!

In my opinion, quoting stuff like "less than normal" and using it for the headline is pretty misleading - you ought to give a definition as to what you mean by normal (avg? median? time period?), and perhaps where the value falls in the distribution: Pretty darn close to normal, and note how it's even incorrect for SF in your own article.

What happened to the promised El Nino rains. Our climate is changing radically because of the expansion of the backside of the tropical circulation that is the driest air on earth. We are becoming another Ethiopia. Our California political leadership still thinks that we have 30 years to fix climate change. If we can't get the promised rain from the strongest El Nino ever recorded then be prepared for permanent drought.

Uh, shrodes, sorry to "rain on" your polemic there, but you posted it just at the start of the first of two multi-day periods of heavy rain that have been forecast, for some time, to occur in the next week or so. We're now in the middle of the first such multi-day storm, and it's actively raining (with flash-flood watches announced).

Nature is answering your question "what happened to the promised El Nino rains" and moreover, you'd have known that before posting, if you followed the weather forecasts.