Hail on the lawn in South San Francisco.

The first year i moved to California was the end of 97′ and that winter season was my first El Niño experience. Now as another El Niño season is upon us, we are experiencing some interesting weather. Yesterday afternoon I was greeted by a hail storm. This picture is a pretty good representation of the pea sized stuff that came down. It was the closest i’ve felt to having snow on the lawn in a costal region.

Hail on roof of shed.

Just when I was thinking of writing a post about this season, I ran across this article, What the EL? by Chris Dixon, a Surfermag correspondent. The article compares these two seasons and has some pretty interesting comments from a Climate Researcher in a Division of the Scripps Institution in San Diego. Comparing the 97/98 season where storms spanned the entire pacific:

“I don’t exactly know why we’re getting so much storminess on the West Coast, which is another question. And even though we’re getting storms in the South, if you look at the North — Washington and the interior Northwest, they have not built up the snowpack and water supply this winter that we have from essentially California southward. In that respect we’re similar to the precipitation pattern that one expects out of a more typical El Niño, but when you look at the storms that cause this precipitation activity, they just do not follow the El Niño kind of profile.”

There’s no doubt that Oregon and Washington have been getting tons of snow so keeping an eye on the snow pack and precipitation tables might be a good comparison at the end of the season to see how the lower half of the west coast faired. As for my sidewalk, the hail has melted so i won’t have to break out the shovel and moon boots just yet.

Hail covering the yard.