It’s Unofficial: L.A. Did Have Its Wettest Year

It’s not official, but we may have set a new seasonal rainfall record in downtown Los Angeles after all.

Here’s why:

The official record for a season, which runs from July 1 through June 30, is 38.18 inches and was set in 1883-84, according to the National Weather Service. The weather service says that during the season that ended Thursday, 37.25 inches of rain fell on downtown Los Angeles, a measly .93 of an inch short of the record.

But the rainfall wasn’t measured in the same place.

In 1883-84, the gauge was on the roof of a downtown building, about two bocks from the current City Hall. In 2004-05, the gauge was on the ground at USC, about three miles away.

While the weather service chronicled its recent readings at USC, Daniel Resch, a hydrologist with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, continued to collect the readings at the downtown Civic Center.

“We found that the new station at USC tended to have slightly cooler temperatures and slightly less rain,” Resch said. “The station at USC did not break the record. The station at the Civic Center did.”

Resch said the gauge atop the DWP’s three-story parking structure on Ducommun Street, which was the official weather service downtown station from 1987 to 1999, collected 38.32 inches of rain during the 2004-05 season, breaking the 1883-84 record by .14 of an inch.

“Officially, the record for Los Angeles was unbroken,” he said. “But for those of us down here in the concrete canyons of the Civic Center, it was the wettest year on record.”

Of course, there are those who have doubts about that too. Some historians have said that the wettest season in Los Angeles probably was in 1861-62, before official records were kept.

The official collection of rainfall data began in 1877-78. In 1883-84, when the official record was set, the gauge was atop a five-story structure at 300 N. Main St., about two blocks north of today’s City Hall.

During the decades that followed, the gauge moved around quite a bit but was always within a small area downtown and usually atop a building, Resch said.

In 1964, he said, the weather service gauge was moved to the top of a DWP building on Ducommun Street, about three blocks east of City Hall. In 1987, it was moved to the roof of the garage on the same property. In 1999, the weather service created a new downtown weather station at USC, and it’s there that all official readings are now collected.