After three years of relentlessly bad news about California’s historic drought, the drenching storm that barreled in Thursday from Hawaii finally delivered the state some desperately needed good news.
One storm does not end a drought as severe as this one, meteorologists and water managers emphasized again Thursday. But this storm and last week’s milder one have done something very important: They have saturated the parched ground across Northern California so much that rainfall is finally starting to fill up the state’s dangerously low reservoirs as it runs down streams, rivers and hillsides.
And just like last week, the wet weather Thursday is expected to be followed by a couple of dry weekend days, reducing the risk of major flooding. The next system isn’t expected to arrive until Monday.
For California water scientists, that’s the “perfect storm” — just enough to deliver billions of gallons of runoff to bank in reservoirs, but not enough rain to trigger life-threatening mudslides and floods.
Now, with a near-perfect start to the 2014-15 rainy season, the state needs to repeat the pattern over and over again until March or April, scientists said Thursday.
“It’s the middle of December, and we’ve had two good storm systems,” said Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. “This could be the end of the drought; we won’t know until late March. But it is certainly an easing of the drought.”