So are you guy's coming into El Nina or El Nino in the cycle? I lived in Sacramento for 15 years and it even wreaked havoc up there!
Kinda in between Dharma... The Sierra's got enough snow, we just didn't get any rain down south. We haven't had a winter with the wave after wave of fronts typical with either... El Nino is usually the wettest and La Nina is said to be the dry period between El Nino's... I'll need to check long range forecasts and the Farmers Almanac...
F.A. predicts about the same as last year... Not much and then there's this...
"Long-Range Forecast Update and What Happened to El Nino
October 05, 2012; 2:30 PM
Before I get to the ECMWF model weekly update, I have been studying the El Nino Southern Oscillation more closely over the past few months as it appeared that we were headed for at least a weak El Nino starting this fall and into the winter.
Over the past month, however, the trend towards El Nino has stopped and we basically remain in a near-neutral phase.
El Nino is the abnormal warming of the sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. The waters in this region were clearly warming relative to normal this summer and appeared to be headed toward El Nino. However, over the past several weeks we have seen a larger area of cooling relative to normal in the central equatorial Pacific. I certainly do not think that we are headed back toward La Nina, but I am starting to believe that the ENSO will have minimal impact on North America's weather this coming winter as it hangs close to neutral."
Long-Range Forecast Update and What Happened to El Nino - Canadian Weather Blog Weather Blog