This would be an impressive rainmaker during the dead of winter, but this is April, and Ryan Kittell, forecaster for the National Weather Service’s office in Oxnard, Calif., said these numbers are reached perhaps once a decade.

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It’s the continuation of a stretch of wet weather that began a month ago — right about the time Californians started to hunker down in hopes of flattening the covid-19 curve. Since March 10, the weather station on the University of Southern California’s campus has seen just under seven inches of rain, or nearly half of all taken in for the entire water year.

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If that sounds like a lot for March and April, it is. According to historic norms, the average rainfall during those two months is 3.34 inches.

And that’s where the “average” amount of rain falling upon Los Angeles reveals itself to be made of extremes:

Dry, wet, dry, wet — which brings us to the present storm.

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It began Sunday, as a cold front slowly slid through the state, breaking daily records almost everywhere (downtown Los Angeles got 1.1 inches Monday). Thankfully, Kittell noted, the frontal passage’s impressive hourly rainfall totals didn’t create any debris flow problems in areas scarred by wildfire.

Then, a zone of low pressure at high altitudes began drifting around the Mojave Desert, toward Las Vegas before retreating, like someone at a party who wobbles about and spills their drink everywhere. With the system in no hurry to leave, everywhere in Southern California got soaked.

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In Pasadena, nestled along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the storm’s rainfall has exceeded four inches. In the mountains themselves, from Santa Barbara County southward, totals topped six inches, and at the highest elevations, such as Mountain High Resort near Wrightwood, 30 inches of snow has been recorded.

Accompanying the precipitation has been unseasonably cold temperatures. On Thursday, lowest maximum temperature records were broken or tied from Lake Elsinore (52 degrees) and Santa Ana (55) to Palm Springs (62) and El Cajon (61).

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Thursday’s high at USC was 57 — only 1 degree away from the all-time lowest high for the day, and 15 degrees below normal.