Mayor Discovers a Bad-Weather Friend at College

There was more than a little disbelief last week when San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor assembled the media in her office and, in a wide-ranging press conference on water conservation, proclaimed her feeling that California’s 5-year drought might be ending.

“I am an optimistic person, and I realize that,” she said at the briefing March 13. “But I’m beginning to think that the weather is a-changing, and you might be seeing the tail end of that drought, even though there isn’t anybody in the state that seems to want to admit that today.”

It rained hard that night, and there was a bit of drizzle Thursday. It rained again Friday. It poured Monday. On Tuesday there was so much rain that a new record for the date in San Diego was set. By 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, more than half an inch had fallen.

In fact, it has rained more than 2.66 inches in the eight days since O’Connor warned everyone to get out their umbrellas. Local precipitation is now ahead of normal for the season. Up north, the snowpack is growing and reservoirs are filling to the point that the state Department of Water Resources is considering increasing the water supply to thirsty urban areas--a demand that O’Connor has repeatedly made.

Even for O’Connor, the coincidence seemed too good to be true. How was the mayor able to predict what may be the drought’s demise?

Meet Harold Throckmorton, a Mesa College meteorologist and O’Connor’s sole adviser on local rainfall, according to the mayor’s spokesman, Paul Downey. Throckmorton had a hunch, “a gut feeling” he called it, that March would bring substantial rainfall.

O’Connor has played that hunch, and the result so far has been the political equivalent of filling an inside straight in the mayor’s against-all-odds gamble on voluntary water conservation.

Although O’Connor’s insistence that San Diegans need not be subjected to mandatory water use prohibitions has earned her derision around the state, she has been able to point to the recent torrents of rain in her virtually solitary quest to ease the water cutbacks.

“March is tricky,” said Throckmorton, a 52-year-old geography professor who seems sent by central casting for the role of weather adviser. “March can be extremely wet, very wet, and very windy and very wild, just like we’ve been having the last few days. Or it can be . . . just completely mild.”

With a monthly precipitation average of 1.6 inches, March is San Diego’s second-wettest month, behind January at 2.11 inches, according to National Weather Service statistics.

In a city with more than its share of expert meteorologists, Throckmorton is not known as a leading figure, nor does he claim to be one. Throckmorton, who holds a master’s degree in geography, worked briefly for the CIA, the U.S. Army, a private meteorological firm and the State University of New York before beginning his 24-year career at Mesa.

“I cannot give you anything concrete that gave me that feeling,” he said. “I use all sources” including the National Weather Service.

“I’ll look at the Weather Channel. I’ll just look at the pressure patterns as they’re exhibited on the Weather Channel. I’ll listen to the weather band radio, and then I put these pieces together in my mind and say, ‘Aha, on the basis of the information I’m getting from here, here and here, I think it’s going to be thusly.’ ”

For the record, no one but O’Connor has publicly expressed the belief that the drought is ending--Throckmorton included. Although storage in state reservoirs has increased, it remains at about 50% of average, and the snowpack in the critical western Sierra Nevada is just 57% of normal.

“It’s certainly much better, but in no way has it . . . ended the drought,” said Maury Roos, chief hydrologist at the state Department of Water Resources.

“I have no credentials to say that,” Throckmorton said. “There are so many facets that have to be analyzed to actually come out and say the drought is over. I’m not a hydrologist for one thing, and I don’t have first-hand information.”

Throckmorton had not even spoken to O’Connor when the mayor made her March 13 pronouncement on the drought. But he is in daily contact with O’Connor’s sister, Colleen, who teaches in the same Social Sciences department at Mesa.

Colleen apparently has been keeping her sister advised of Throckmorton’s prognostications, since the end of February, before the series of heavy storms began.

And, last Friday, O’Connor spoke twice with Throckmorton, seeking his counsel on whether he thought the heavy rain would continue. He told her he believed that it would.

Like O’Connor, Throckmorton believes that voluntary conservation measures should be extended, at least until the city goes through a dry month that will test residents’ resolve to conserve. He also believes that the State Water Project’s total cutoff of water should be eased.

“I would like to see what people will do” in a month without rainfall, he said. “I know that a lot of the water savings is because of the fact that nobody’s watering their lawns . . . (and) nobody’s washing their cars.”

Last summer, he said “that’s what (city residents) were asked to do, and in essence they complied with what they were asked to do.”

Times staff writer Bernice Hirabayashi contributed to this story.