Update, Thursday, June 11: From the National Weather Service, here are some of the precipitations records (and other rain totals) recorded during Wednesdays mostly light but very welcome showers:
Place | Rain (inches) | Record/Year |
Castro Valley | .47 | -- |
Las Trampas Ridge | .36 | -- |
Livermore | .33 | .16/1976 |
Oakland Hills (South) | .30 | -- |
San Francisco Int'l. Airport | .26 | .03/2009 |
Petaluma Airport | .21 | -- |
Oakland Airport | .18 | .05/1976 |
San Rafael | .17 | .01/1950 |
Point Reyes | .17 | .10/1937 |
Napa | .13 | .25/1958 |
San Francisco (Downtown) | .11 | .20/1937 |
San Jose | .10 | .07/1976 |
Original post: When Abraham Lincoln said, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge ... may speedily pass away," he was actually talking about something more serious than California's drought.
But yeah, the sentiment fits the way most of us feel about our seemingly endless siege of much, much drier-than-normal conditions, now in its fourth year. So when we wake up to a rainy morning -- in June, for heaven's sake -- we grasp at the spectacle of gentle showers for whatever hope it offers that this mighty scourge may end ... someday.
And to stop the quasi-poetic waxings on meteorology for a minute, Wednesday's storm has produced some decent rainfall (for June) around the Bay Area and other parts of California. Most locations in the Bay Area had gotten less than a tenth of an inch of rain as of 11 a.m. Wednesday. But there were some exceptions, with the highest totals recorded in the hills of the East Bay:
Place | Rain (inches) | Record/Year |
Castro Valley | .43 | -- |
SFO Int'l. Airport | .24 | .03/2009 |
Las Trampas Ridge | .23 | -- |
Oakland Hills (South) | .21 | -- |
Petaluma Airport | .18 | -- |
Oakland Airport | .18 | .05/1976 |
Livermore Airport | .18 | .16/1976 |
Point Reyes | .16 | .10/1937 |
Napa | .13 | .25/1958 |
Olema | .13 | -- |
Mount Tamalpais | .13 | -- |
Much heavier rain has fallen in parts of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains of Northern California and the highlands of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. NOAA reports show .79 of an inch fell at Shasta Dam, in the Sacramento River watershed north of Redding; many locations in the mountains around Lake Tahoe show a similar amount; as much as an inch of rain fell in the mountains north of Santa Barbara.