If you’ve been outside any time in these last few weeks, you’re sure to have noticed the rain that seems so unusually prevalent nowadays. Usually, spring is when the rain clears out and the weather turns bright, but this year we’ve had a different sort of pattern: The clouds — and the wet weather that accompanies them — are making a strong last stand.

It’s not just a feeling, either. Last year, in April of 2025, the maximum daily precipitation was 0.19 inches. In the whole month, only 0.31 inches of rain fell on Livermore(the site of our closest available major weather history log, approximately 11 miles from Dublin). In what we have had of April 2026, 24 days in at the time of writing, we have had a max of 0.42 inches of rainfall in a single day and a whopping 1.05 inches of rain over the course of a month. Our maximum rainfall in one day alone this year was more than all of the rain that fell over the whole month of April last year, and our total was more than three times its counterpart!

But that’s not the whole story. In fact, one could say that this year is normal and last year was the outlier. April 2024 saw 1.34 inches of rain in total, and April 2022 saw 1.03. But what about April 2023, then? Only 0.08. That stops 2025 from being an outlier and starts to build the idea that maybe this isn’t a fluke.

All weather is inherently unpredictable. However, dramatic changes year by year aren’t exactly normal either. The real reason rainfall varies so much in California? Well, it’s not as simple as one solid cause. Climate change, for one, is a driving factor behind weather volatility, but it’s not the whole story either. California has been in drought for much of its history, and when the total rainfall is so low, fluctuations that would have been seen as normal in other states can be amplified by multiple times in our state. For example, in Washington, which gets approximately 45 inches of rain yearly, five inches of variance is approximately an eleven percent difference. In California, with an average of 23.5 inches of rain yearly, five inches of variance is a whole twenty-one percent difference. The people, too, are more sensitive to small changes in rain, being unused to the precipitation. What a Washingtonian would experience as a few rainy days can be equivalent to a Californian’s week-long storm.

So, what can be done about this? Not much at the individual level. We don’t control the weather, after all. However, as a community, there are a lot of options for us. We can, for example, improve our notoriously bad rain management infrastructure, such as gutters, and increase our volume of state water storage. California, so used to being a dry state, is not prepared to deal with yearly fluctuations in precipitation. With climate change increasing the margin of what rainfall is possible, new measures must be taken to ensure the rain-preparedness of Dublin, of Alameda County, and of California.