Welp, here we go again. After a long period (a full season, really) of different kinds of exceptional weather conditions all around California, there’s yet one more big storm to come in the immediate future (discussed below). But what has transpired in the past, oh, 48 hours or so?
More than 9,000 California residents were under evacuation orders Friday as a new atmospheric river brought heavy rain, thunderstorms and strong winds, swelling rivers and creeks and flooding several major highways and small rural communities.
In Santa Cruz County, a creek bloated by rain destroyed a portion of Main Street in Soquel, a town of 10,000 people, isolating several neighborhoods. Crews were working to remove trees and other debris and find a way for people to cross the creek, county officials said.
When the nation’s largest desalination plant opened in Carlsbad, California, in 2015, people across the country were watching to see how it increased water supplies as groundwater dwindled, reservoirs dried up, and drought ravaged the Golden State.
Nearly 10 years later, the plant has demonstrated how seawater desalination can play a pivotal role in achieving water security.
Two winters’ worth of snow has already fallen in the Sierra Nevada since Christmas, pulling California from the depths of extreme drought into one of its wettest winters in memory.
But as a series of tropical storms slams the state, that bounty has become a flood risk as warm rains fall on the state’s record snowpack, causing rapid melting and jeopardizing Central Valley towns still soggy from January’s deluges.
Once mired in drought, California now has too much of a good thing and has opened spillways on key reservoirs as the first of two atmospheric rivers made landfall Thursday afternoon.
The Golden State activated the Flood Operation Center ahead of the incoming storms, to notify officials of high water levels and support local flood relief efforts.
PETALUMA, Calif.—Neil McIsaac has something many other dairy farmers here don’t: a storm-runoff capture system that can provide backup water for his herd when local reservoirs go dry, as they did last year.
Already, he and others involved in the project say it has proven its worth. It has captured 670,000 gallons so far this winter, enough to slake the thirst of his 700 cows for a month, Mr. McIsaac said.
With back-to-back storms to hit California in the coming days, state officials are scrambling to make strategic releases from key reservoirs in hopes of preventing a repeat of the flooding that killed nearly two dozen people in January.
At least 10 rivers are forecast to overflow from the incoming “Pineapple Express” storm, which is expected to drop warm, heavy, snow-melting rain as it moves from the Central Coast toward the southern Sierra beginning Thursday night into Saturday.
Millions of Californians were under threat on Thursday from an approaching storm that could trigger intense downpours and widespread flooding in many parts of the state, including in some mountainous areas already buried under a near-record snowfall.
After a weeks of unusually bad weather on the West Coast, the storm known as an atmospheric river could dump as much as 3 inches (8 cm) of rain in the San Francisco Bay area and across the Central Coast from Thursday through the weekend, the National Weather Service (NWS) said in its forecast.
States that use water from the Colorado River are caught in a standoff about how to share shrinking supplies, and their statements about recent negotiations send mixed messages. California officials say they were not consulted as other states in the region drew up a letter to the federal government with what they called a “consensus-based” set of recommendations for water conservation. Leaders in states that drafted the letter disagree with that characterization.
After three nasty years, the La Niña weather phenomenon that increases Atlantic hurricane activity and worsens western drought is gone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.
That’s usually good news for the United States and other parts of the world, including drought-stricken northeast Africa, scientists said.
