Historical El Niño for San Luis Obispo County
Historically, El Niño years have been wetter about 60 percent of the time and drier about 40 percent of the time in San Luis Obispo County. NOAA cautions that individual El Niño events and different areas can have substantially different precipitation outcomes because other atmospheric patterns influence where storms actually go.
As an example, here is rainfall for the City of San Luis Obispo and the City of Paso Robles during previous El Niño years.
| El Niño year | City of SLO rainfall | vs. 22.42" average year |
City of Paso Robles rainfall | vs. 15.26" average year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1958 | 29.3" | +31% | 25.13" | +64.6% |
| 1964 | 19.4" | −13% | 10.27" | -32.7% |
| 1966 | 16.7" | −26% | 11.97" | -21.5% |
| 1973 | 39.2" | +75% | 22.86" | +49.8% |
| 1983 | 49.9" | +123% | 26.36" | +72.7% |
| 1987 | 17.1" | −24% | 8.02" | -47.4% |
| 1992 | 23.7" | +6% | 14.51" | -4.9% |
| 1995 | 41.5" | +85% | 31.03" | +103.5% |
| 1998 | 35.9" | +60% | 27.09" | +77.5% |
| 2003 | 13.2" | −41% | 14.03" | -8.1% |
| 2010 | 33.0" | +47% | 21.05" | +38.0% |
| 2016 | 15.9" | −29% | 13.33" | -12.6% |
*Using NOAA records