What made our Wednesday-Thursday storm different from most we've seen this winter? At KQED Rain Watch Headquarters in Berkeley, it was the thunder.
I awoke just after midnight to a series of earsplitting blasts that shook our 96-year-old headquarters building. My chief assistant, who also had been asleep, believed we were having an earthquake.
Then the rain and hail started pounding down. Then we went back to sleep.
So what did our mid-February storm bring?
According to stats reported on the California-Nevada River Forecast Center site (look for the "Observed Precipitation" tab on the right side), a rain gauge near New Almaden Quick Silver County Park, in the hills of South San Jose, recorded 2.23 inches of rain. Several nearby locations in that hilly area of Santa Clara County also totaled more than 2 inches -- the most anywhere in the nine-county Bay Area. Lower-elevation locations across the region got anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of an inch.