This Tucson Winter

During this El Niño winter with each storm Tucsonans have been reminiscing about winter rains (and mountain snows) of long ago. People say that this winter is like when I first moved here or when I was a kid. But we need only go back four years to find a winter similar to this one in Tucson.

The scatterplot above is almost the same figure presented and discussed in my post five months ago, but now with this winter included. This November through March five-month period is not complete, and so this winter could yet creep past the one four years ago. Either way, this winter and the one four years ago are the two wettest winters for Tucson since the winter of 1997-1998. Together this decade's three above-normal winters (all El Niños, two of them with ONIs qualifying as weak El Niños) rank 12th, 13th and tied for 16th wettest out of the last 70 years, making up somewhat for the dud strong El Niño winter three years ago.

This year's running total for Tucson Airport for the five-month period November through March stands at 144% of normal. Adding in last year's very wet October, Tucson's running total for October through March stands at 180% of normal. That latter number can be more easily compared with the real-time water-year analyses for the entire Colorado River Basin (under that site's tab Monthly Precipitation; March so far has been very good to the areas in Colorado and New Mexico that missed out earlier).