The historic and destructive storms that ravaged California this week have significantly boosted the state’s snowpack and water year outlook after a relatively dry start to the season, state water managers say.
Climate change is upping the odds that a disastrous flood with up to 10 feet of water might actually happen in California. The ARkStorm may not be real yet, but it’s scientifically plausible.
All the rain that has led to swollen rivers and flooding in parts of San Diego and large portions of Southern California has coincided with multiple snowstorms that blew across the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the northern half of the state.
Experts say coming weeks will be critical in seeing if we’ll stay drought-free or experience climate-fueled whiplash back to dry conditions. The record-setting rain that’s pummeled Southern California over the past few days, coupled with solid water storage from last year’s wet winter, has Harvey De La Torre, head of the Municipal Water District of Orange County, offering this reassuring prediction:
For as long as weather records have been kept, California has been defined by its highly variable climate, with dramatic and sometimes volatile swings between droughts and floods. As human-caused climate change heats up the planet, the state faces even more intense extremes, with increasingly frequent and severe droughts punctuated by stronger and wetter storms.
A plan to extract lithium — the lustrous, white metal used in electric vehicle batteries — in southeast Utah is adding to an anxiety familiar in the arid American West: how the project could affect water from the Colorado River.
Climate change is making it a matter of time before a megaflood hits the state. The Santa Barbara police car blocked access to the bridge, lights flashing as the thundering, swollen brown river rampaged below. The water was running so high in this Southern California county that it gushed through the railings of the bridge, and poured out onto the road.
While this week’s atmospheric river drenched Southern California with record-breaking rainfall, some water managers were busy capturing some of that runoff to save for dry days ahead. Others were busy fending off an environmental disaster.
California is expected to receive more rainfall by Friday from an atmospheric river storm than what Lake Mead in Nevada—the largest reservoir in the U.S.—can hold, meteorologists have said, as the state continues to face the threat of flooding.
Drinking water in the United States is at risk, scientists have said, as nitrogen pollution seems to be increasing.
