Safe to say that we won't be getting any more rain in Tucson this month. That means that the total at the Tucson airport for these five winter months, November through March, will be 3.48 inches, which is about 4.5 times the total for the same period last year, and just a little below the average for those five months over the last 60 years. I had about an inch more than the airport. That plus the fact that we did not have a late freeze is making the plants look much better this year. In my previous post, I had suggested that there were two winters, 1974-1975 and 1999-2000, that would serve as good analogues for this past winter in Tucson. In fact this past winter's rainfall was much better than those earlier second-year-of-La-Niña-in-a-row winters.
Since chatter about La Niña has ceased, it might come as a surprise to learn that those conditions are still in place, although weakening. March will probably be close to the end for La Niña, so the ocean temperature anomaly will have averaged about -0.75 C over the five-month winter period. For much of the rest of the country, the last two winters, both La Niñas, have been about as far apart as winters can get. So much for a repeat of last winter
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