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"Was it always dry?" Depends where you are. It's usually dry in The Valley, and SoCal, and wet on the North Coast, with snow in the Sierras. " If not then what happened to cause it to be so dry?"
Global warming in general,
California 'rain debt' equal to average full year of precipitation
By the end of January, 2016, a giant patch of remarkably warm water in the northeast Pacific off the U.S. west coast, nicknamed The Blob, appears to have dissipated. Its break-up is thanks in part to the strong El Niño in the equatorial Pacific, say scientists.
The so-called blob formed in response to an unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure that emerged over the northeastern Pacific Ocean in the winter of 2013-14. The feature, which was so unrelenting that meteorologists took to calling it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, weakened winds in the area enough that the normal wind-driven churning of the sea eased. Those winds usually promote upwelling, which brings deep, cool water up toward the surface; instead, the resilient ridge shut down the ocean circulation, leaving a large lens of unusually warm surface water in the northeastern Pacific.
