Anthony Watts

Just in case somebody tries to tell you that 2022 is the "worst drought ever," it is actually the 18th driest ever for California.

Don't listen to climate doomsters.

Kristi Diener > ‎The CA Water For Food and People Movement

💧The 2022 water year currently ranks 18th driest! Follow along.💧
Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the statewide tabulations for average August rainfall. NOAA keeps the official precipitation records, which began in 1895.

For months that have already happened, there are 127 years of data. For months that are upcoming in 2022, there are 126 years of data. These numbers will become part of the historical record for future tracking and comparisons. As a reminder, water years begin on October 1, and end on September 30 of the next year.

So far, the first 11 months of the 2022 water year are the 109th wettest out of 127 water years, or the 18th driest of 127. NOT the first, the second, the third...but the 18th.

Using this 11-month span and comparing it to the previous 11-month spans on record, 65 times this span has been drier than the mean, and 62 times this span has been wetter than the mean.

Put another way, 51% of the time these first 11 months of our water year were drier than average, and 49% of the time these first 11 months were wetter than average.

Out of the 127 years on record, here are how the first 11 months of the current 2022 water year ranked individually.

1 is the driest, and 127 is the wettest:

October 2021 - 124 (extremely wet)
November 2021 - 21
December 2021 - 110 (extremely wet)
January 2022 - 2 (extremely dry)
February 2022 - 2 (extremely dry)
March 2022 - 13
April 2022 - 73
May 2022 - 22
June 2022 - 90
July 2022 - 60
August 2022 - 111 (extremely wet for August)

When you hear declarations like, "This is the driest year on record!", even without looking at the figures you will know that is false. There is still one more month left in the current water year that hasn't happened yet. Comparing a few months of a water year, to complete 12-month water years, is simply fake news. It also looks like Hurricane Kay is going to bring us some good September rains now through the weekend.

Even by randomly selecting certain dry months out of a water year, as has been done ad nauseam with January, February, and March, we still cannot make the claim we are having a record dry year, any more than we can randomly select the wet months of October, November, and December and claim we are having a record wet year.

As a final note, the earth is 4.5 billion years old. There have been 35,433,070 (35.4 million) spans of 127 years. In other words, the 127-year precipitation record is merely a micro-dot in time.

Source here: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series/4/pcp/11/8/1895-2022?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1895&endbaseyear=2022
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Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:03 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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