A year in water: how much rain did the Central Coast pick up this 'water year'

Here in California, we see almost all of our rain in the winter months. This impacts the way we record our rain and how we talk about it, too.

The California Water Year runs from October 1st through September 30th each year. As we close the 2024-2025 water year, here is a look at what we saw across Central Coast communities!

(Quick note: I listed them with some of our largest communities first, then north to south for the smaller communities. If you don't see your community, I am sorry, many official rain gauges had tech issues this year, and so we don't have accurate measurements.)

Here are a few more!

The numbers above are what I could piece together. Our microclimates and topography lead to vast differences in totals by community. If you have data, please let me know what you've recorded!

A few communities we have graphs to show the data between rain totals through the year and our average year-to-date rain. Here are a few of the graphs!

The black line denotes our rain this year, while the blue is the year-to-date average. As you can see, we stayed well below the typical rain totals.

Another way to look at how we did this year is with the Drought Monitor. Here is a look at the past year.

On the whole the state is well below normal accumulations this year. Most of northern California did well, though; on the other hand, the southern half...not so much.

As we head into the winter months, models slightly favor a La Niña pattern (57%). Temps are expected to be slightly above normal through the winter with near normal precipitation. These are climate trends though; day-to-day variability is still very much expected. For the Central Coast, almost all of our water comes as atmospheric rivers in just a few systems. While none are in the forecast for the next few weeks, as situations set up, the weather team will keep the region informed!