Record Rainfall

A ton of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and an inordinate amount from the Pacific Ocean conspired Wednesday to create a steady downpour of rain in New Mexico, dropping as many as 2 inches in the southern parts of the state and nearly an inch and a half in Santa Fe.

Clay Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, tells SFR that the 1.3 inches that fell as of 6 pm at the Santa Fe Airport were a record-breaker for the calendar day, the previous high set in 2006 within a 24-hour period.

The cold and steady stuff turned the capital city into a gloomy Pacific Northwest for just a day, quite the bummer for motorists, but a delight to snowboarders and skiers as a base starts to form with New Mexico's first significant dustings of snow.

While scant, snow did fall in elevations above 8,500 feet, particularly in the Sandia, the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges, Anderson says.

"You can always bet when it's this cold and it's raining this hard, then it's going to be snowing someplace up in the mountains," Anderson says.

Ski Santa Fe's website reports 4 inches of snow in the last 24 hours.

In the City Different, police dispatchers reported a little more than a dozen downpour-related automobile mishaps, with no serious injuries as drivers either had fun hydroplaning along certain pockets of Cerrillos Road or feared it like the reaper, swerving to avoid the intermittent lakes.

On the city's east side (pictured above), the hard rain that was gonna fall, as forecast, did so, bringing mud from the hills and turning Canyon Road and Acequia Madre into clay-colored corridors that became even harder to negotiate due the narrow roads.

Yet as of press time, no major flooding was reported in the city, but San Ysidro crossing off Agua Fría was hurting as of early Wednesday evening, a dispatcher reported.

And all of it was at least  partially due to El Niño, a weather pattern that increases the temperatures of Pacific Ocean waters, to as much as 87 degrees off Mexico's coast and near the Equator, according to Anderson. To give you a sense of how scalding hot that is, temperatures in the Pacific Ocean in Southern California are hard-pressed to hit the low 70s during the middle of the summer.

"Whenever you have such a warm ocean, it's going to impact the weather patterns everywhere," Anderson says.

While Wednesday's eye of the storm actually hovered over central Arizona, it was New Mexico that took the brunt, Anderson claims.

"It's just because we're smack in the middle of the Gulf and the Pacific," he says.

Anderson says that rain should continue Thursday but in much less proportions. He also predicts there will be some sunshine, but temperatures will range between the 40s and the 50s.

Santa Fe Reporter