Environment: Light Rain in San Francisco

Twitter is mildly amusing at the moment, as many SF Bay Area people are wildly excited over the actuality of water falling from the sky.

The unfamiliar pitter-pat sounds on windows. The smell of petrichor. They are posting absurdly mundane videos celebrating droplets on windshields! Here in California, where fires in the mountains have burned for MONTHS, rain is a big deal.

Water! FROM THE SKY! 😄

We’d really like Wildfire Season to END.

It has been an agonizingly dry year. We only got about 30% of our hoped-for water from October of last year through September of this year. We’d really like to do better.

Here’s what the US Drought Monitor for California looks like (brace yourself, it’s bad):

This image is available as a pdf at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/data/pdf/current/current_ca_trd.pdf

If monthly numerical tables are more of your thing, here is NOAA’s data from our sad water year:

If you know people in the SF Bay Area or California generally, be prepared for their/our delight over a basic weather phenomenon that may be ordinary for you, but which feels like an incredible gift for us.

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