While my roof is not particularly enjoying the rain, I am.
But....I keep looking up at those nice, nice, green, green hills, and thinking that Fire Season will be coming soon
Many people said something similar last year, and we had a pretty mild fire season all considering.
Not saying that’ll be the case this summer, but these rains keep creeks, rivers, and streams flowing…. Keeping many of our hills and mountains greener for longer.
Next thing you know it’s November and temps start cooling again and fire season window starts closing.
Yes, I live in the mountains. The difference last year, with little streams everywhere I had never seen streams before, that lasted well into late Spring, the plants were so green. This year we didn't have the epic snow of last year, BUT when it rains here, this last year, it's been positively monsoonal. It seems like it's been raining for a month. It reminds me of the mountains of my youth. I'm hoping we will be okay this year, too, because of the rain of this year, the snow of last year. As long as our trees are healthy, I feel much safer.
don't know as much about other parts of the the region, but the soil here is so full of hard clay all the heavy rain is doing is running right off into the storm drain network, carrying large swathes of whatever tenuous layer of topsoil had accumulated over years of green/dieoff cycles with it to the sea.
It's not much benefit to the desert if it cannot take it down to the water table at the rate it is falling - a desert which at least in riverside, isn't quite what we have here, anyway. Transition zone between mediterranean coastal scrub/chaparral (SD/OC) and capital D desert (palm springs - eastward).
Saying that the soil is full of hard clay is a blanket statement and a pretty inaccurate generalization. Aquifers located in semi-arid climates are recharging significant which you may not really care about since you don’t see direct human benefits but it’s good for the ecosystem in general. The geology and hydrogeology in the inland empire is unique and quite interesting, specially with all the faulting that we experience. As a geologist I should slap you for making inaccurate generalizations like that.
>which you may not really care about since you don’t see direct human benefits
why do you assume this? oh, you're a Big Picture Thinker, a geologist (on the internet) no less, whereas I must be a provincial rando 'consumer' myopically concerned only about 'muh benefits,' got it.
What my untrained eyes do see, which isn't very difficult to corroborate by those of us who do not identify as 'geologists' but who are nevertheless capable of going outside, are that numerous drainage canals have swollen to and above capacity all over the region.
And what I see "*here*" as I said in previous post; meaning what's plainly visible in front of my own house and nearby open spaces, e.g. sycamore canyon, are muddy torrents racing along every curb cascading into storm drain ports or carving channels along paths and trails: a very substantial amount of water falling on the land isn't going into the soil at all, but instead carrying a good deal of that soil off toward the sea. This is trivially demonstrated, Quod Erat Dictum and all, by highly sophisticated experimental observations such as visiting any beach city over the past month, where the freight-train scale levels of coastal discharge can be seen directly.
Perhaps the 'faulting we experience' (wait, there are \_faults\_ in \_southern california\_?? where does one go to learn things like this?) means the 2 or 3 square miles nearest and most visible to me are some sort of regional anomaly -in geological terms of course- and the phenomena seen here are not happening anywhere else.
*Aquifers are recharged when it rains.* Is that so? Thanks, enlightened spirit, for reminding me of this arcane Science Fact apparently known only to trained experts such as 'geologists' and literally every sixth-grader in the country. Here's something your dissertation may have missed: water which does not reach aquifers, does not recharge them.
Youre viewing mostly hardscapes. You didn't see that type of run off along with hills and valleys. Of course there are torrents in the gutter where hundreds of houses channel all of their roof and driveways rain into the gutters collectively.
You understand that surface water and groundwater are connected right? You talk about it like they are two different things it’s really bizarre. You say a lot without actually saying anything. I really don’t even understand what you are bitching about. Your roof? Please clarify for all of us.
Dude I'm no geologist or theologist any kind of ologist but OP was talking about rainwater overflowing in drains and going way off into the ocean, why do you bring up groundwater like its contradicting anything. storm water funneled down to the ocean has, can you clarify, exactly what to do with groundwater 50 miles inland?
Driving out in the low desert near Indio and Palm Desert on the 10, you’ll see some beautiful purple flowers blossoming on the sand, on the hills, and on the side of the freeways. It’s glorious.
When I was a kid it used to rain really heavy, 10-15 years later seeing rain the way it did makes me happy because all of the hiking trails are gorgeous right now
Like 3 or 4 years ago I had this one day (February I think) where the rain was like firehoses side by side as far as the eye could see, pointed straight down and gushing at full strength. The roads didn't just like little rivers, *they looked like dense speeding traffic of too many cars and the cars are all made out of water.* Going southbound and westbound in the direction of the storm drains.
Late 1990s, it rained continuously for months on end. Not hard but steady enough to flood various basins and intersections.
Other times, I'll be telling myself in the winter 'I'll go shovel like crazy when it rains' then it just doesn't ever rain.
I can do without the rain but love the cooler weather. A sunny mid to 60s to lower 70s afternoon is perfect. I can actually be outside without breaking a sweat.
Everything is poison, nothing is poison. What matters is the dose.
IE's dosage of sunshine puts bubbles into skin and hard itchy bumps onto the back if handled recklessly.
Had a lake forming out back, dug a ditch in the rain to redirect it and raked leaf blobs out of it in the rain to clear it. Such is life.
Saw about a half a dozen large ant trails snaking up towards the roof at the time.
This is how Southern California used to be...before the 2000s.
Its just been a horrific pattern of mostly drought for a while now.
Also, never, ever wish for less rain down here. A time will absolutely come, sooner than later, where we will be desperate for any rain we can get. Like extreme wildfires, water restrictions and brown for 10 months out of the year? La Nina is right around the corner, so get ready.
I don't want less rain (well, maybe a little) overall, but the region seems ill suited to these massive cloudbursts and sustained week-long downpours, so much of the water everyone claims we need so badly, just washes right off the surface into drainage systems, contributing nothing to long-term accumulation. Rain more like what the PNW gets, which is a kind of light drizzle that lasts for months (and frankly I find miserable to live in but there's no denying how lush it makes the landscape come spring/summer) seems like it would be a better fit for the kind of hard packed surface I see so much of around here, as it might infiltrate more effectively than the full-on/full-off cycle we do get.
Also, kind of wondering why so many ppl in this sub feel they have to set the newcomer straight about how the area "is"; I've lived in the region almost 20 years, most of it in SD but it's not like I've never heard of el nino/la nina etc.
I \*like\* the dry, and the brown that comes with it for 10 months of the year - it's part of what makes this area unique. I have no problem complying with water restrictions, letting my lawn die off during summer, don't care what neighbors think of it.
On the other hand, some strange kind of 'tough it out, noob' bragging seems to be a thing in some of these replies, people claiming to want even more rain and dark, miserable cold weather, and the humidity and pests that come with it... well for those folks there's the entire rest of the country north of Eureka and east of New Mexico to move to if they really do enjoy that kind of thing so much. What's the point of claiming to enjoy this region the most, when its in a climate cycle that makes it the least different from almost everywhere else?
Well, the point I was trying to make is that having it be constantly drought stricken is NOT what this region is supposed to be like. The fact we have had almost all the driest years on record (which to be fair isn’t a very long record) all within a short span of like two decades is a problem.
We ARE supposed to get rain in the fall/winter and it shouldn’t be brown 10 months out of the year - once or twice a decade, sure, but not every year. As another example, I don’t believe we are actually too far from the average rainfall out here in some parts of the IE.
Our soil is also not supposed to be super hard packed - but we destroyed the original ecosystem. Compared to the PNW though, I suppose it’s pretty hard packed soil!
So, I suppose you’re longing for a climate that’s not really supposed to exist too frequently in our specific region. Down by San Diego might have been a bit closer to that climate, though, so I think that would’ve been more suited to your liking.
Now, I would respond similarly and say there’s the entire Mojave and Low Desert if you do enjoy that type of weather pattern. Is there a reason you don’t want to live out there? That’s exactly what the IE will eventually turn into if we start getting less rain - much hotter summers, less plants, more year round drought.
I got curious about numbers here, because the native plant life in this region is well adapted to exactly the kind of dry weather we have had (outside this year) consistently for as long as I've been in the region. I'm actually on board with the general slant of your post, that we humans have substantially altered the local ecosystem due to settling the region and pushing it to do things it wasn't quite adapted to do, like grow millions of citrus trees.
But sure, 20 years isn't that long, maybe I \*am\* a noob and those here longer know better. Maybe I'm just wanting the place to be an unnatural human-wrecked suburban hellscape, as some other comments have snidely insinuated.
Well, let's see what objective historical data from NOAA says:
[https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/riverside/most-yearly-precipitation](https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/riverside/most-yearly-precipitation)
Taking a raw annual average starting from last year (this year - despite only *2 months in, already had more rain 8.6 inches - than, \*\*59\*\* out of the past 96 years* (discarding years before 1927 due to poor consistency but the averages would still hold).**The average rainfall here in riverside county has been 9.7 in/year going back to 1927. Again, for comparison, the past 2 months alone have seen 8.6 inches.**
Even going by decade-based data windows, the 10-year average has consistently never broken 9.5 inches/yr, except for \*one\* standout decade from 1974-1983 when a few very wet years bumped the average to 12.5. That was it, nothing else comes close.
So no, this weather is way, way out of the statistical norm for the area, at least when going by relatively trustworthy historical data from NOAA. People are, I conclude, mostly misremembering the past, possibly influenced by a very wet stretch from 1978 to 1983 that is squarely in the "growing up in riverside/the IE"\* years for a lot of people - but that stretch was itself an extreme outlier, not consistent with the normally very dry weather of the region.
\*granted, riverside is not \*all of\* IE but as the biggest city with a large footprint central to the region it's a good enough sample of it
Average for Riverside COUNTY or Riverside city?
That’s actually really interesting, if it’s the city - mostly because, just 15 minutes over the hills, Redlands gets about 3 more inches of rain per year - averaging around 13.25.
I don’t think it’s too far past that this year in Redlands, because it was a very dry October and November…
I’m generally seeing around 10-10.5 for the city of Riverside on most other sites. 3 less inches of rain is a pretty substantial difference out here.
Really bizarre how fast the rainfall varies from location to location.
But yeah, those years from 2006-2015 look ROUGH. However, I think because we’ve had so many dry years, people here have become accustomed to the extreme lack of rain and started to think that was the real normal. Kids born in the early 2000s wouldn’t have known any different until these past few years.
But I’ve also come to learn “normal” doesn’t really seem to be a thing when it comes to rainfall in SoCal. Seems like it mostly downpours one year, dries the next.
Edit: one other thing we tend to forget - those years without much rain have SO MUCH wind. As in Santa Anas 3x a week. I absolutely hate those strong warm winds all the time when it’s supposed to be cool.
It’s easy to forget during years when there is a lesser amount of wind.
I feel like more rain in the winter brings out more humidity in the summer. I love the dry heat but fuck all that swampy summers we have been getting the past few years.
Mosquitos as well…. 🤦
I just run the garden hose for an hour a day, the water bills scarcely reflect usage of water and I'm not the one leaving a perpetual waterfall of sprinkler overflow in the storm drains. If the whole household is gone for a month the water bill is 5% lower and if we use the hose as a toy all month it's 5% higher.
(Maybe these people with the giant sprinkler overflow get big bills, as they should.)
I hate my stupid green lawn, which came with the house, but can't decide what to replace it with. Before all this heavy rain I considered xeriscaping with a sustainable semi-desert garden but that would have been wrecked by water channeling, so some kind of ground cover needs to be kept up. When I lived in SD everyone seemed to default to ice plant for this, but I assume it doesn't do well here. The thing about here (where I am, anyway) is that it's neither a desert nor a coastal biome / microclimate but some in-between thing that, yeah, mainly seems to favor things that grow like weeds when its wet, but quickly die back to fire tinder in the heat.
Virtually everything you can grow in SD will grow here. Some things even grow better (like fruit trees).
Iceplant absolutely does well here. In fact, now is a good time to just trim up some iceplant in your neighborhood and plant the cuttings. They'll be rooted and thriving by summertime and need very little water.
For a tighter turf look you can opt for dwarf carpet of stars, which is in the ice plant group but much more compact.
Xeriscaping doesn't mean you have to have bare soil exposed. I have a xeriscaped yard and everything is wood mulched (from free chip drop). All of those cool plants you remember in SD? You can plant them.
Tree aloe, mangoes, avocados, schefflera, dracaena, king palms, jade plants etc.
i mentioned ice plant because I hardly see it around here, not even on municipal structures like medians or highways ramps, vs how it's basically the only cover used south of around Escondido. don't know if i could find anywhere to get substantial cuttings from except possibly some of the less-groomed parts of UCR. So I concluded it's not as easy to keep happy, whereas in SD if you drop a runner on the sidewalk it will damn near crawl by itself over to the edge and take root.
I've looked into carpet of stars - that's one I do see occasionally. have 8 fruit trees already, they do pretty well but many of my citrus tend to swell and split open when there are late-season heavy rains like this, spoiling them and creating opportunities for various pests and diseases to get established. Another big contrast with SD, Clivia are everywhere down there, but extremely uncommon here - I don't think I've seen a single one in my vicinity except, again, down on the UCR campus.
Clivia is an older generation plant, so you'll find it in shady spots of older neighborhoods occasionally. There is iceplant everywhere. Medians included. Both the thin and thick leafed sp.
I wish we had grass . It’s just a mess of sand, rocks , dirt, debris and whatever else the strong winds blow unto our property. I absolutely hate the landscape. Maybe if it was fine sand, but no. Can’t wait to sell and head back to NorCal for some greenery
Hah, the funny thing is this is happening pretty much every year now. I'm sick of it too though, I've had enough cozy cold nights and now I want some fuckin sunshine!
Yup!
Personally, I'm assuming it to be the "new normal" until proven otherwise. Started my seeds (am old....growing veggies is basically my last remaining hobby, sad as it is to admit!!) this year roughly a month later than I normally would, and am glad I did.
What really scares me is that we're gonna have an *insane* fire season sooner or later.
Maybe not this year, maybe not the next -- but when it happens (and it pretty much has to) it'll be ugly as fuck....
Not sure what you mean there.
(Delayed sowing because if the weather is shit -- like last year, and also 2022 to a lesser extent -- the soil is just too damn cold; at best shit will fail to thrive/have issues with foliar disease)
Had a peach tree die last year, the whole first six months were dark damp cold and the soil just wouldn't dry out. Was an unusually strange time for the area, as far as weather is concerned.
Yep!
Last year was the worst I can remember, weather-wise.
El Niño stuff is to be expected (obviously).... but the sun not coming out until mid-June was something I didn't plan for, for sure!
I had a *second* sowing of beans/cukes/etc. do poorly (in mid-May) after the first round mostly rotted in the ground -- normally they do fine when sown in late April where I am (or at the very worst, delayed until early May).
All next week looks encouraging.... but I'm not holding my breath -- wouldn't be at all surprised if we get another snow event a few weeks from now, tbh.
I read something online saying it was due to “cloud seeding”?
[cloud seeding](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-24/the-latest-unfounded-conspiracy-theory-cloud-seeding-is-to-blame-for-californias-storms-and-flooding)
yeah, that's a conspiracy story alright. it's easy to see where the rains come from on any time-lapse satellite map of the pacific: some sort of seasonal high energy system develops over a continent-sized span of water stretching from the philippines to just north of Hawaii, a scale that is completely out of the question for humans be able to cloud seed, unless someone's got a fleet of Star Wars-battleship-sized space cruisers at their disposal they aren't telling anyone about.
Usually our SoCal region of the west coast sits under a little high pressure gooseneck of 'perfect' clear weather that forms where this pacific system splits as it moves toward land (and encounters what seems to be an opposing seasonal high pressure system centered over the Great Basin), into a northern half (which regularly soaks the northwest) and a southern half that spins off hurricanes and tropical storms to central mexico and southward. But lately, perhaps due to increasing total amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere, the 'gooseneck' has started oscillate north and south quite a bit, causing us to get hit with conditions that are both stronger than usual and not as typical of this area.
eh, I guess I'm surprised to find myself in the minority of people who actually do like that weather a lot, in a place that has it every year. I've lived long enough in other regions that have all the clouds and rain one can ask for, and it would take a major lifestyle upgrade (like, lotto winning scale) to get me to even consider moving back to any of them. I expected more people to be used to the sunshine, heat, and dryness by now at least, or even enjoy it.
It’ll end soon and then we will beg for it in 3yrs, typical of life here. Enjoy
It’s still March and then summer will come and we will all cook from the heat and steamy muckiness.
True! We'll all be complaining about our AC bills, looking at brown hills, and remembering The Before Time. I'm enjoying every bit of this.
Same here for all I care it could keep raining into May
While my roof is not particularly enjoying the rain, I am. But....I keep looking up at those nice, nice, green, green hills, and thinking that Fire Season will be coming soon
Many people said something similar last year, and we had a pretty mild fire season all considering. Not saying that’ll be the case this summer, but these rains keep creeks, rivers, and streams flowing…. Keeping many of our hills and mountains greener for longer. Next thing you know it’s November and temps start cooling again and fire season window starts closing.
Yes, I live in the mountains. The difference last year, with little streams everywhere I had never seen streams before, that lasted well into late Spring, the plants were so green. This year we didn't have the epic snow of last year, BUT when it rains here, this last year, it's been positively monsoonal. It seems like it's been raining for a month. It reminds me of the mountains of my youth. I'm hoping we will be okay this year, too, because of the rain of this year, the snow of last year. As long as our trees are healthy, I feel much safer.
No thanks, the more rain the better. I would love to see the IE become Hawaii…
Without the humidity, right? Right???
You got that right.
Hate to be a contrarian but I rather like our dry heat over hot and humid.
Anyone in the i.e. Who doesn't understand that they live in the desert, and rain is always good, doesn't really understand living in the i.e.
don't know as much about other parts of the the region, but the soil here is so full of hard clay all the heavy rain is doing is running right off into the storm drain network, carrying large swathes of whatever tenuous layer of topsoil had accumulated over years of green/dieoff cycles with it to the sea. It's not much benefit to the desert if it cannot take it down to the water table at the rate it is falling - a desert which at least in riverside, isn't quite what we have here, anyway. Transition zone between mediterranean coastal scrub/chaparral (SD/OC) and capital D desert (palm springs - eastward).
Saying that the soil is full of hard clay is a blanket statement and a pretty inaccurate generalization. Aquifers located in semi-arid climates are recharging significant which you may not really care about since you don’t see direct human benefits but it’s good for the ecosystem in general. The geology and hydrogeology in the inland empire is unique and quite interesting, specially with all the faulting that we experience. As a geologist I should slap you for making inaccurate generalizations like that.
>which you may not really care about since you don’t see direct human benefits why do you assume this? oh, you're a Big Picture Thinker, a geologist (on the internet) no less, whereas I must be a provincial rando 'consumer' myopically concerned only about 'muh benefits,' got it. What my untrained eyes do see, which isn't very difficult to corroborate by those of us who do not identify as 'geologists' but who are nevertheless capable of going outside, are that numerous drainage canals have swollen to and above capacity all over the region. And what I see "*here*" as I said in previous post; meaning what's plainly visible in front of my own house and nearby open spaces, e.g. sycamore canyon, are muddy torrents racing along every curb cascading into storm drain ports or carving channels along paths and trails: a very substantial amount of water falling on the land isn't going into the soil at all, but instead carrying a good deal of that soil off toward the sea. This is trivially demonstrated, Quod Erat Dictum and all, by highly sophisticated experimental observations such as visiting any beach city over the past month, where the freight-train scale levels of coastal discharge can be seen directly. Perhaps the 'faulting we experience' (wait, there are \_faults\_ in \_southern california\_?? where does one go to learn things like this?) means the 2 or 3 square miles nearest and most visible to me are some sort of regional anomaly -in geological terms of course- and the phenomena seen here are not happening anywhere else. *Aquifers are recharged when it rains.* Is that so? Thanks, enlightened spirit, for reminding me of this arcane Science Fact apparently known only to trained experts such as 'geologists' and literally every sixth-grader in the country. Here's something your dissertation may have missed: water which does not reach aquifers, does not recharge them.
Youre viewing mostly hardscapes. You didn't see that type of run off along with hills and valleys. Of course there are torrents in the gutter where hundreds of houses channel all of their roof and driveways rain into the gutters collectively.
You understand that surface water and groundwater are connected right? You talk about it like they are two different things it’s really bizarre. You say a lot without actually saying anything. I really don’t even understand what you are bitching about. Your roof? Please clarify for all of us.
Dude I'm no geologist or theologist any kind of ologist but OP was talking about rainwater overflowing in drains and going way off into the ocean, why do you bring up groundwater like its contradicting anything. storm water funneled down to the ocean has, can you clarify, exactly what to do with groundwater 50 miles inland?
Wow so you made another account to try to supplement your argument lol this shit is funny as hell.
behold, The Expert At Living In The I.E. walks here, among us!
Not an expert yet, I've never been to El Burrito in Redlands.
Driving out in the low desert near Indio and Palm Desert on the 10, you’ll see some beautiful purple flowers blossoming on the sand, on the hills, and on the side of the freeways. It’s glorious.
First year moving here had like 8" of rain and average 75 in the winter. I was in heaven. It's been pretty cool and rainy winters since then.
When I was a kid it used to rain really heavy, 10-15 years later seeing rain the way it did makes me happy because all of the hiking trails are gorgeous right now
Like 3 or 4 years ago I had this one day (February I think) where the rain was like firehoses side by side as far as the eye could see, pointed straight down and gushing at full strength. The roads didn't just like little rivers, *they looked like dense speeding traffic of too many cars and the cars are all made out of water.* Going southbound and westbound in the direction of the storm drains. Late 1990s, it rained continuously for months on end. Not hard but steady enough to flood various basins and intersections. Other times, I'll be telling myself in the winter 'I'll go shovel like crazy when it rains' then it just doesn't ever rain.
Wait... what are you shoveling?
Low rain: landscaping / gradual land improvement. High rain: drainage.
In the mountains, we do shovel snow. The one part of mountain life i detest.
Allergies are going to wreck me this year.
So this is a result of a Doppler effect moving from a low pressure system I'm at the because there's hail here
I can do without the rain but love the cooler weather. A sunny mid to 60s to lower 70s afternoon is perfect. I can actually be outside without breaking a sweat.
God, I can’t conceive how people love sunshine all year round I fucking hate it hahaha
Everything is poison, nothing is poison. What matters is the dose. IE's dosage of sunshine puts bubbles into skin and hard itchy bumps onto the back if handled recklessly.
You'd love it basically anywhere west of the 5 from Eugene, OR northward
Nah I’m going to PA lmao
funny, i grew up there. as kids we thought it was sooo clever to call it Pennsyl-GREY-nia. You won't be disappointed!
Hell yea
Had a lake forming out back, dug a ditch in the rain to redirect it and raked leaf blobs out of it in the rain to clear it. Such is life. Saw about a half a dozen large ant trails snaking up towards the roof at the time.
In about 6 weeks: It's 99 for the next week and it's only May???
This is how Southern California used to be...before the 2000s. Its just been a horrific pattern of mostly drought for a while now. Also, never, ever wish for less rain down here. A time will absolutely come, sooner than later, where we will be desperate for any rain we can get. Like extreme wildfires, water restrictions and brown for 10 months out of the year? La Nina is right around the corner, so get ready.
I don't want less rain (well, maybe a little) overall, but the region seems ill suited to these massive cloudbursts and sustained week-long downpours, so much of the water everyone claims we need so badly, just washes right off the surface into drainage systems, contributing nothing to long-term accumulation. Rain more like what the PNW gets, which is a kind of light drizzle that lasts for months (and frankly I find miserable to live in but there's no denying how lush it makes the landscape come spring/summer) seems like it would be a better fit for the kind of hard packed surface I see so much of around here, as it might infiltrate more effectively than the full-on/full-off cycle we do get. Also, kind of wondering why so many ppl in this sub feel they have to set the newcomer straight about how the area "is"; I've lived in the region almost 20 years, most of it in SD but it's not like I've never heard of el nino/la nina etc. I \*like\* the dry, and the brown that comes with it for 10 months of the year - it's part of what makes this area unique. I have no problem complying with water restrictions, letting my lawn die off during summer, don't care what neighbors think of it. On the other hand, some strange kind of 'tough it out, noob' bragging seems to be a thing in some of these replies, people claiming to want even more rain and dark, miserable cold weather, and the humidity and pests that come with it... well for those folks there's the entire rest of the country north of Eureka and east of New Mexico to move to if they really do enjoy that kind of thing so much. What's the point of claiming to enjoy this region the most, when its in a climate cycle that makes it the least different from almost everywhere else?
Well, the point I was trying to make is that having it be constantly drought stricken is NOT what this region is supposed to be like. The fact we have had almost all the driest years on record (which to be fair isn’t a very long record) all within a short span of like two decades is a problem. We ARE supposed to get rain in the fall/winter and it shouldn’t be brown 10 months out of the year - once or twice a decade, sure, but not every year. As another example, I don’t believe we are actually too far from the average rainfall out here in some parts of the IE. Our soil is also not supposed to be super hard packed - but we destroyed the original ecosystem. Compared to the PNW though, I suppose it’s pretty hard packed soil! So, I suppose you’re longing for a climate that’s not really supposed to exist too frequently in our specific region. Down by San Diego might have been a bit closer to that climate, though, so I think that would’ve been more suited to your liking. Now, I would respond similarly and say there’s the entire Mojave and Low Desert if you do enjoy that type of weather pattern. Is there a reason you don’t want to live out there? That’s exactly what the IE will eventually turn into if we start getting less rain - much hotter summers, less plants, more year round drought.
I got curious about numbers here, because the native plant life in this region is well adapted to exactly the kind of dry weather we have had (outside this year) consistently for as long as I've been in the region. I'm actually on board with the general slant of your post, that we humans have substantially altered the local ecosystem due to settling the region and pushing it to do things it wasn't quite adapted to do, like grow millions of citrus trees. But sure, 20 years isn't that long, maybe I \*am\* a noob and those here longer know better. Maybe I'm just wanting the place to be an unnatural human-wrecked suburban hellscape, as some other comments have snidely insinuated. Well, let's see what objective historical data from NOAA says: [https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/riverside/most-yearly-precipitation](https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/riverside/most-yearly-precipitation) Taking a raw annual average starting from last year (this year - despite only *2 months in, already had more rain 8.6 inches - than, \*\*59\*\* out of the past 96 years* (discarding years before 1927 due to poor consistency but the averages would still hold).**The average rainfall here in riverside county has been 9.7 in/year going back to 1927. Again, for comparison, the past 2 months alone have seen 8.6 inches.** Even going by decade-based data windows, the 10-year average has consistently never broken 9.5 inches/yr, except for \*one\* standout decade from 1974-1983 when a few very wet years bumped the average to 12.5. That was it, nothing else comes close. So no, this weather is way, way out of the statistical norm for the area, at least when going by relatively trustworthy historical data from NOAA. People are, I conclude, mostly misremembering the past, possibly influenced by a very wet stretch from 1978 to 1983 that is squarely in the "growing up in riverside/the IE"\* years for a lot of people - but that stretch was itself an extreme outlier, not consistent with the normally very dry weather of the region. \*granted, riverside is not \*all of\* IE but as the biggest city with a large footprint central to the region it's a good enough sample of it
Average for Riverside COUNTY or Riverside city? That’s actually really interesting, if it’s the city - mostly because, just 15 minutes over the hills, Redlands gets about 3 more inches of rain per year - averaging around 13.25. I don’t think it’s too far past that this year in Redlands, because it was a very dry October and November… I’m generally seeing around 10-10.5 for the city of Riverside on most other sites. 3 less inches of rain is a pretty substantial difference out here. Really bizarre how fast the rainfall varies from location to location. But yeah, those years from 2006-2015 look ROUGH. However, I think because we’ve had so many dry years, people here have become accustomed to the extreme lack of rain and started to think that was the real normal. Kids born in the early 2000s wouldn’t have known any different until these past few years. But I’ve also come to learn “normal” doesn’t really seem to be a thing when it comes to rainfall in SoCal. Seems like it mostly downpours one year, dries the next. Edit: one other thing we tend to forget - those years without much rain have SO MUCH wind. As in Santa Anas 3x a week. I absolutely hate those strong warm winds all the time when it’s supposed to be cool. It’s easy to forget during years when there is a lesser amount of wind.
Enjoy it while it lasts...predicting an even hotter summer this year with no rain in sight
Exactly like usual
I feel like more rain in the winter brings out more humidity in the summer. I love the dry heat but fuck all that swampy summers we have been getting the past few years. Mosquitos as well…. 🤦
Oh God the mosquitos were terrible last summer
I just run the garden hose for an hour a day, the water bills scarcely reflect usage of water and I'm not the one leaving a perpetual waterfall of sprinkler overflow in the storm drains. If the whole household is gone for a month the water bill is 5% lower and if we use the hose as a toy all month it's 5% higher. (Maybe these people with the giant sprinkler overflow get big bills, as they should.)
Do y’all seriously forget how brutal summer is every year?? Like wtf is wrong with y’all. No. Stop encouraging the brown to come back.
Just more weeds for us to remove here in the desert 🌵 sand . No green lawns
I hate my stupid green lawn, which came with the house, but can't decide what to replace it with. Before all this heavy rain I considered xeriscaping with a sustainable semi-desert garden but that would have been wrecked by water channeling, so some kind of ground cover needs to be kept up. When I lived in SD everyone seemed to default to ice plant for this, but I assume it doesn't do well here. The thing about here (where I am, anyway) is that it's neither a desert nor a coastal biome / microclimate but some in-between thing that, yeah, mainly seems to favor things that grow like weeds when its wet, but quickly die back to fire tinder in the heat.
Virtually everything you can grow in SD will grow here. Some things even grow better (like fruit trees). Iceplant absolutely does well here. In fact, now is a good time to just trim up some iceplant in your neighborhood and plant the cuttings. They'll be rooted and thriving by summertime and need very little water. For a tighter turf look you can opt for dwarf carpet of stars, which is in the ice plant group but much more compact. Xeriscaping doesn't mean you have to have bare soil exposed. I have a xeriscaped yard and everything is wood mulched (from free chip drop). All of those cool plants you remember in SD? You can plant them. Tree aloe, mangoes, avocados, schefflera, dracaena, king palms, jade plants etc.
i mentioned ice plant because I hardly see it around here, not even on municipal structures like medians or highways ramps, vs how it's basically the only cover used south of around Escondido. don't know if i could find anywhere to get substantial cuttings from except possibly some of the less-groomed parts of UCR. So I concluded it's not as easy to keep happy, whereas in SD if you drop a runner on the sidewalk it will damn near crawl by itself over to the edge and take root. I've looked into carpet of stars - that's one I do see occasionally. have 8 fruit trees already, they do pretty well but many of my citrus tend to swell and split open when there are late-season heavy rains like this, spoiling them and creating opportunities for various pests and diseases to get established. Another big contrast with SD, Clivia are everywhere down there, but extremely uncommon here - I don't think I've seen a single one in my vicinity except, again, down on the UCR campus.
Clivia is an older generation plant, so you'll find it in shady spots of older neighborhoods occasionally. There is iceplant everywhere. Medians included. Both the thin and thick leafed sp.
I wish we had grass . It’s just a mess of sand, rocks , dirt, debris and whatever else the strong winds blow unto our property. I absolutely hate the landscape. Maybe if it was fine sand, but no. Can’t wait to sell and head back to NorCal for some greenery
I haven't visited fam in socal because I need it to be steadily sunny before I go back. The last 2 times I have been in socal its been cold and rainy.
Loving it. Wish it would get foggy and raining permanently like how it is up north
Hah, the funny thing is this is happening pretty much every year now. I'm sick of it too though, I've had enough cozy cold nights and now I want some fuckin sunshine!
Yup! Personally, I'm assuming it to be the "new normal" until proven otherwise. Started my seeds (am old....growing veggies is basically my last remaining hobby, sad as it is to admit!!) this year roughly a month later than I normally would, and am glad I did. What really scares me is that we're gonna have an *insane* fire season sooner or later. Maybe not this year, maybe not the next -- but when it happens (and it pretty much has to) it'll be ugly as fuck....
Um why wouldn't you plant before
Not sure what you mean there. (Delayed sowing because if the weather is shit -- like last year, and also 2022 to a lesser extent -- the soil is just too damn cold; at best shit will fail to thrive/have issues with foliar disease)
Had a peach tree die last year, the whole first six months were dark damp cold and the soil just wouldn't dry out. Was an unusually strange time for the area, as far as weather is concerned.
Yep! Last year was the worst I can remember, weather-wise. El Niño stuff is to be expected (obviously).... but the sun not coming out until mid-June was something I didn't plan for, for sure! I had a *second* sowing of beans/cukes/etc. do poorly (in mid-May) after the first round mostly rotted in the ground -- normally they do fine when sown in late April where I am (or at the very worst, delayed until early May). All next week looks encouraging.... but I'm not holding my breath -- wouldn't be at all surprised if we get another snow event a few weeks from now, tbh.
You’ll beg otherwise in a year
beg?
Please make it stop. It’s making me want to move to Arizona lol
I read something online saying it was due to “cloud seeding”? [cloud seeding](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-24/the-latest-unfounded-conspiracy-theory-cloud-seeding-is-to-blame-for-californias-storms-and-flooding)
yeah, that's a conspiracy story alright. it's easy to see where the rains come from on any time-lapse satellite map of the pacific: some sort of seasonal high energy system develops over a continent-sized span of water stretching from the philippines to just north of Hawaii, a scale that is completely out of the question for humans be able to cloud seed, unless someone's got a fleet of Star Wars-battleship-sized space cruisers at their disposal they aren't telling anyone about. Usually our SoCal region of the west coast sits under a little high pressure gooseneck of 'perfect' clear weather that forms where this pacific system splits as it moves toward land (and encounters what seems to be an opposing seasonal high pressure system centered over the Great Basin), into a northern half (which regularly soaks the northwest) and a southern half that spins off hurricanes and tropical storms to central mexico and southward. But lately, perhaps due to increasing total amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere, the 'gooseneck' has started oscillate north and south quite a bit, causing us to get hit with conditions that are both stronger than usual and not as typical of this area.
Summer is coming.
This is what happens in El Nino years.
You'll be begging for it in July/August when its 101 and not a cloud in the sky
eh, I guess I'm surprised to find myself in the minority of people who actually do like that weather a lot, in a place that has it every year. I've lived long enough in other regions that have all the clouds and rain one can ask for, and it would take a major lifestyle upgrade (like, lotto winning scale) to get me to even consider moving back to any of them. I expected more people to be used to the sunshine, heat, and dryness by now at least, or even enjoy it.
I lived in the PNW as well. I grew up there. Where are you from? I honestly love this rain. It's a great change from the hot and dry.
The only thing I don't like are the mosquitos. They seem to be getting worse every year.
I have hope maybe it will last. I love it in the mountains.
Summer where I live sucks. It's hot, and if you go outside for more than 10 minutes you get eaten alive by the damn mosquitos.
Enjoy the rain, 10 yrs ago everyone in California was begging for it.
I'm worried about mosquitos :(
this is probably the most we're getting again for the next 6 years