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After That Stormy Week, How Much Rain Did LA Get?
(Photo by Brian Bubonic via Flickr)
A week of steady, often heavy rain pushed the Los Angeles area closer to the type of wet winter that's been rare in recent years.
In the past seven days, we received nearly 30 percent of the rain that we typically get in a year. That jump puts us comfortably ahead of our usual pace of rainfall, as the graph below shows.
The metric used by LAist/KPCC reviews data from weather stations in more than twenty locations across Southern California, ranging from Newport Beach to Santa Barbara, and including inland areas such as Mount Wilson and Redlands.
Many have a historical record that stretches back to World War II, providing a baseline to put this year's weather in context. It uses the "water year" from October to September that scientists use to track weather in the Western U.S.
Currently, the metric shows Southern California has already received about 61 percent of a normal year's precipitation. On a typical Jan. 18, that figure is far lower, around 41 percent.
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National Weather Service officials said this week's storms dumped a total of nearly a foot of rain throughout the region. All that water is a good thing for drought-stricken SoCal in general, but it also caused flooding, mudslides, evacuations in recent fire burn zones and traffic chaos, especially with the atmospheric river that rolled through on Thursday.
The rain has left SoCal, but a few roadways were still closed as of 9:30 a.m. Friday as crews work to clear rocks, mud and debris.
However, the L.A. area has been the outlier in terms of rainfall.
"If you look at a map of where the precipitation has been, it pretty much forms a bullseye on the Los Angeles Basin," David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told LAist. (Pierce created the metric we use for these charts.)
Other areas -- including San Diego and California as a whole -- haven't had the unusually rainy conditions we've experienced in L.A.
Ryan Fonseca contributed to this story.
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