Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

Fifth wettest October on record in the Mono Basin

At Cain Ranch, a precipitation station five miles south of Lee Vining that is representative of precipitation patterns on Mono Lake, October 2016 precipitation was 2.1 inches. This was the fifth-wettest October since 1931 and about 325% of average. Two of those other wet Octobers occurred in 2009 and 2010.

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October 2016 was also the sixth-wettest month at Cain Ranch in the last decade, and curiously three of those months were the Octobers mentioned above. The other three months that were wetter than October 2016 were December 2010 and 2012 and May 2015. Aside from the wet Decembers, this pattern is unusual, since December and January and February are usually the wettest months of the year.

The rain in the last week raised all the creek flows and also raised Mono Lake from 6377.12 to 6377.19 feet above sea level, putting it back on track with the lake level forecast DWP made in the spring.