William Schmitz of the Southeast Regional Climate Center put together a scorecard of how the rainfall conditions this winter (December to February to date) compare to previous strong El Niño events. You can see the scorecard at https://www.sercc.com/ElNinoRainScorecard.pdf. The scorecard shows that the 1997-98 event set records across the region for the wettest DJF on record. The 1982-83 event had quite a few stations with rainfall records in the top two. By comparison, this year’s event has been setting fewer records, with the wettest conditions confined to south Florida.
Of course, February is not over and we are likely to see some additional precipitation (either rain, snow or ice) by the end of the month, but probably not enough to change all of these rankings.
