Humans are prone to emotional conclusions like “the weather has gone crazy”. Last year at this time, even with the normal rainfall in the north half of the state, many asserted that California was in “new normal” permanent drought. The far above normal rainfall throughout the state this year shows that this sentiment is clearly wrong, but the same folks who set forth permanent drought will now assert unprecedented “crazy rain”.
We have done a series of posts on the drought in California using data from San Francisco that dates back to 1850. Here we present a look at the same data looking at high rainfall years in the same data set to evaluate how crazy this year really is.
Perhaps this year’s trough is not so terribly tenacious after all. The season is not over and the tingling in my own bones is that it will be a wet spring, like many I remember from the seventies. Nevertheless, if I were a betting man, I would bet that this year will top out below the five previous years shown. If this season dries out, there will be more years to add above this year.
The point here is that the “ridiculously resilient ridge” that led to four consecutive years of below normal rainfall in California did not produce any individual years of record drought. If the terribly tenacious trough does the same in reverse, where are we?
As we have always been; naked apes staring into the sunrise. Is God punishing us?
If you want to project your guilt onto statistical noise, you go.
I’m going with the data.
geosciencebigpicture 
I used to be, an “Energy Economist,” in Washington D.C., for both the Ford & Carter Administrations {FEA & DOE]. While I cannot quarrel with gymnosperm, on Actual Data, I thought @ the Time, that Dr. Francis had done something all but Worthy, of a Nobel Prize. {Explaining, in simple terms, the magnificently Counter-Intuitive Drift towards Winter Coldness across the U.S., as the Atmosphere Generally Warmed due to CO2.}
SHE certainly was much too bright, to Assert, anything that would become the “emotional conclusion” of 2016-17. Albert Einstein, who, when we were Kids in the 50’s, was Universally Known to be the SMARTEST Human who had ever lived. E = M x C x C, & all of that. In the early 1950’s nearly @ the end of his famous life, Al said, something like: “Infinity = 2 Things; 1) the Observable Universe appears to be Infinite; & 2) Human Beings are Infinitely Stupid. Occasionally, I do have some Doubt, about # 1.”