El Niño

California weather tends to be pretty routine. I’m talking about the Coastal part of the state with a Mediterranean climate. The summers are dry and hot except for the fog along the coast. The winters are cool and comparatively wet -- in California it usually gets wetter and wetter the further north you go. Year in and year out this is the pattern but there is one other pattern that can make the wet season either less wet or amazingly wet which has to do with the temperature of the ocean off South America. One of the winters I lived in SoCal, 1965, was an El Niño winter with the kind of rain usually associated with the monsoons of South Asia. 

Because the usual rain in SoCal is so modest, the developer of the suburban neighborhood where we lived in Van Nuys decided they could dispense with storm sewers. When it rained, the water would just run into the streets which would eventually lead to some storm sewer outside the neighborhood or to the Los Angeles river that ran, between those famous concrete walls (shown in so many Hollywood chase scenes). And most of the time this works just fine, until El Niño strikes. After a couple days of deluge our street was flooded from curb to curb and up onto the lawns. To walk to school meant crossing the lawns halfway to the house while climbing over small fences and shrubbery.

While the normal rain is heavier in the north, El Niño rain is subtropical -- instead of storms there is just steady, fairly warm rain for days on end -- so the south usually bears the brunt of the weather. Though I also remember El Niño winters in the SF Bay Area when it never stopped raining for a whole week (1982) or was raining most of the time for months on end. In 1997 I was sharing a shelter, at a train station near San Jose, with a forlorn family that had just moved to the area, while trying to reassure them that it wasn’t always like this.