Rain in June? No Drought-Buster, But We'll Take It

Update, Thursday, June 11: From the National Weather Service, here are some of the precipitations records (and other rain totals) recorded during Wednesdays mostly light but very welcome showers:

Original post: When Abraham Lincoln said, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge ... may speedily pass away," he was actually talking about something more serious than California's drought.

But yeah, the sentiment fits the way most of us feel about our seemingly endless siege of much, much drier-than-normal conditions, now in its fourth year. So when we wake up to a rainy morning -- in June, for heaven's sake -- we grasp at the spectacle of gentle showers for whatever hope it offers that this mighty scourge may end ... someday.

And to stop the quasi-poetic waxings on meteorology for a minute, Wednesday's storm has produced some decent rainfall (for June) around the Bay Area and other parts of California. Most locations in the Bay Area had gotten less than a tenth of an inch of rain as of 11 a.m. Wednesday. But there were some exceptions, with the highest totals recorded in the hills of the East Bay:

Much heavier rain has fallen in parts of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains of Northern California and the highlands of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. NOAA reports show .79 of an inch fell at Shasta Dam, in the Sacramento River watershed north of Redding; many locations in the mountains around Lake Tahoe show a similar amount; as much as an inch of rain fell in the mountains north of Santa Barbara.

And just to be clear: June rain in the Bay Area is nice to see, but it's not a rarity. Although June is sometimes rainless in San Francisco, the one-day precipitation record for the month is 1.34 inches, on June 2, 1967; and just five years ago, California's last decent rain year, 2.02 inches fell in San Francisco during the month.

Forecasters say Wednesday's rain will move slowly south during the day, with a chance of thunderstorms. It ought to be dry Thursday.

While recent cool, moist weather has reduced the state's immediate wildfire threat, the thunderstorms that brought rain to the far northern sections of California brought more than 1,400 lightning strikes that triggered dozens of small fires. Managers of Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity, Klamath and Modoc national forests reported Wednesday that the largest of the fires is 10 acres; virtually all have been contained. Separately, Cal Fire reported a 30-acre fire burning in remote terrain near the Redwood National and State Parks in Humboldt County.

Blazes in the north state last year consumed more than a quarter-million acres.