I hope they are correct. Even then, much of the water being pumped there today fell as rain before Europeans showed up here.

Just sad how we have squandered our fresh water resources. I am watering some tomorrow with 200 foot runs of drip tubing.

Johnny

I'm putting in berms and swales. See if I cannot get ready for El Nino and make the ground happier next year.

Do you still have Austrian Winter peas? If they were inoculated, you could do some serious soil building AND eat a bunch of pea leaves this winter. They taste like peas.

We just planted 10 acres of them. I'll be eating them all Winter.

Yes,I sure do. I think the innoculant is old, but I can innoculate using dirt from the old plot.

And the bad news also is that California and Californians likely could suffer greatly if California takes a hard hit from El Nino. The same sort of rains that may bring drought relief also are likely to cause flooding, mudslides, landslides and the destruction and even death that accompany them. This is doubly true in the areas where millions of acres have been burned by wildfire and those acres lack the vegetation to hold the soil in place during heavy rainfall. I feel sorry for California and its people if El Nino hits them hard with too much rain at one time.

El Nino is only one part of the puzzle though, and other climate patterns will play a role in how much any given area is affected (or not affected) by the El Nino conditions. Sometimes here in southern OK, El Nino weather (late autumn through late winter and sometimes into spring) usually bring us a wetter, warmer season but not always. Sometimes the rain stays south of us, in Texas, for example, and doesn't really make it this far north.

I'd hate to see California and her people have the sort of flooding rains that were widely experienced this past spring and early summer in Oklahoma.

And, just look at OK as an example of how short-lived drought relief can be even when it does occur. Many areas that were under water in May through June and even into July already are back into Abnormally Dry, or Moderate, Severe or Extreme Drought now. It is hard to believe that all those flooding rainstorms couldn't keep some areas out of drought for more than a couple of months.

I hope California and other dry western areas get the desperately needed rainfall but I also hope that rain can somehow fall and help them more than it hurts them. What they really need is for the precipitation to fall in the mountains as snow. The snowpack would melt more slowly and that would allow moisture to soak into the soil more deeply instead of running off.

I've been watching the SSTs since at least March and reading all the El Nino updates issued by government weather agencies and it has made me simultaneously look forward to and yet also dread the effects of El Nino. In some parts of the world, the developing El Nino already has contributed to some dangerous weather patterns and events. I also find it horrible that the very El Nino I'm usually happy to see because it generally means rain for us actually brings a great deal of death and destruction to other parts of the world. I doubt the people in those areas ever are happy to see El Nino develop.

On a personal note, we are so incredibly dry here that I cannot imagine what the winter fire season (which apparently begins today with the issuance of our first Red Flag FIre Warning of the season) will be like if the expected El Nino rainfall misses us. Our KBDI in my county is now the highest it has been since August 2011 at 684 on a scale of 0-800. We normally don't even reach the upper 600s until winter time, long after frost and freezing weather has killed annual vegetation and all the dead and dormant vegetation is dried out and cured. Having numbers like that this year (and in some areas they are well into the upper 700s) before even the first frost is a huge warning sign. We need rain and we need it desperately across much of the state.

We lived in Texas during the last super El Nino, which was in 1996-97, so I don't know what the weather was like up here in OK during that time, but down there we had heavy rainfall and flooding well into spring and a cooler, milder summer.

Despite being in severe drought here, we already have winter weeds sprouting in the lawn (where I have watered occasionally as a form of fire protection) but not in the garden where it is too dry and I'm not watering. Our trees are in pitiful condition and our fields look so dry that you'd think we'd already had the first freeze here. We need a wet year, so we need for the El Nino rainfall to hit us this winter, but we don't need the extreme and excessive rainfall that El Nino brings some years. We still have damaged areas in our county not even repaired yet from the spring and early summer rainfall.

The farmers here plowed in late August so they could plant their winter wheat but the rainfall has been so skimpy that the plowed fields are bare. I'm not sure what that means for the winter wheat season, but it is a poor way for it to start out. In the worst-case scenario, we stay too hot and too dry for the seed to sprout until frost arrives, at which point it will be too late and too cold to get a good stand. I haven't even attempted to clean out the summer garden because we are so hot and dry that snake activity is high, so it seems like the only cover crop my garden will get this year will be from weeds. That is okay with me. Weeds (especially the ones that are dynamic acumulators) will suffice as a cover crop and as compost pile material if that's all we have.

The other bad news is for the Pacific Islanders. We may get their rain and they may get none.

Johnny