It should be raining.
Maybe not at this exact moment, but January and February are when Southern California usually gets almost half of its annual precipitation.
Instead, 2020 is off to a dry start, and meteorologists aren’t seeing any indications that will change in the next month. While a couple of dry winter months don’t make a drought, they could turn spring and summer into particularly bad fire seasons.
“It means we’ll probably get more intense fires in the summer, and more grass fires in the spring,” U.S. Forest Service meteorologist Matt Shameson said.
The water year begins Oct. 1 and it started well, thanks to a few big storms in late November and December, most notably a deluge the day after Christmas. At that point, much of Southern California had received twice as much precipitation as the average for three months into a water year, according to data from the National Weather Service.