This weekend I drove up to Coarsegold to the annual Tarantula Festival. I meet my friend Dennis Fairbanks and he drove me out to his cattle lease. He drove me around showing me the effects of the drought which has plagued California the last few years. On the lease are two gorgeous lakes. Unfortunately the drought has turned them into large mud ponds.

The good news is or hopefully will be, the National Weather Service predicting the possibility of a wet winter.  They report that a weather phenomenon or system called Madden-Julian Oscillation seems to be developing in the Indian Ocean. In the past, this system has generated wet storms for California.

In 1971 Roland Madden and Paul Julian (1) stumbled upon a 40-50 day oscillation when analyzing zonal wind anomalies in the tropical Pacific.The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is an equatorial traveling pattern of anomalous rainfall that is planetary in scale. The mechanism and cause of the MJO is as yet not well-understood and is a subject of ongoing study. The wet phase of enhanced convection and precipitation is followed by a dry phase where convection is suppressed. Each cycle lasts approximately 30-60 days.

The prediction is that there is a potential of storms developing in November, providing a wetter than average fall. We shall see and HOPE.