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The types of storms that have been bringing heavy snow and rain to the West this winter, triggering landslides and floods while easing stubborn droughts, are likely to become stronger and more frequent, according to the results of a conclusive new study.

The drenching storms have been falling from atmospheric rivers — high-altitude streams of moisture that carry much of the West’s water from the Pacific Ocean in sometimes-violent spurts that can lead to floods

The water wars in California are getting uglier.
If you doubt that consider the plight of the Bryon-Bethany Irrigation District. They were slapped — along with other water districts — with a curtailment order on June 12 by the State Water Resources Control Board for water diversions based on pre-1914 appropriative water rights. The targeted districts including Byron-Bethany had the audacity to sue the state on June 26.
Two weeks later, Sacramento Superior County Court Judge Shelleycane Chang ruled the state orders constituted an invalid taking of property.

It’s official: the southwestern United States will likely never be the same again. A new analysis of the past 35 years of weather patterns concluded that what is now considered a normal year of rain and snow in the Southwest is one-quarter drier than it was before the 1970s.

And the climate conditions that bring the region most of its rain and snow will become even more rare in the future, according to a federally funded study posted online Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

While the Atlantic coast of America was preparing for last month’s massive snowstorm, California was enjoying a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from its four-year drought. The prolonged downpour—a harbinger of the imminent El Niño storms — raised pool levels in Los Angeles by almost three inches, providing your correspondent with an extra 500 gallons of water free of the city’s Tier 1 tariff.

Lawns, parks and hillsides that had been left to go brown during the drought (state-wide emergency measures have required cities to cut water usage by 25%) have turned green again. The one dismay has been seeing millions of gallons of precious rainwater pour down hillside gutters and storm drains, as it flowed unhindered into Santa Monica Bay.

So far, Southern California has not seen the back-to-back deluges highly anticipated with this year’s strong El Niño. Last Sunday’s storm dumped snow on the Sierra and thrashed Southern California with high winds, but Ventura County’s lower-lying communities got less than a half-inch of rain.

The county’s total rainfall to date this season is still below 60 percent of normal. But don’t lose confidence in El Niño yet. Curt Kaplan, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Oxnard office, said, “We still have a very strong El Niño set up in the Pacific … and it’s still encouraging. We’ll see quite a few storms come through between now and the end of March and even April.”