Southern California is bracing for its biggest storm of the season, which is slated to deliver potentially damaging and life-threatening rain, wind and flooding to the region.
National Weather Service offices and other reputable meteorologists in California have been doing rumor control about the coming stormy period. Chatter on social media from unreliable sources had implied that the entire state will soon be underwater.
Officials say they expect to release some water from the Oroville Dam’s main spillway on Wednesday. The operation comes as a strong atmospheric river sets its sights on Northern California.
A pair of atmospheric rivers is expected to hit the Western United States and Canada in the coming days.
California ushered in the New Year with a dry and disappointing snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — just 25% of the historical average. But in the month since, like the stock market and the 49ers playoff hopes, the picture has improved significantly.
The atmospheric river that deluged San Diego last week followed close on the heels of enormous waves that punished the California coast at the beginning of the year, with both weather events setting off alarms in more ways than one.
The Western United States and Canada are likely to see excessive rain and heavy snowfall from a sequence of back-to-back atmospheric rivers beginning this weekend and continuing into next week.
In the coming weeks, buckets of rain are likely to batter California. The culprit? Atmospheric rivers. The rains are born far away, deep in the tropical Pacific, where water evaporated from the warm ocean surface is absorbed into the atmosphere.
San Diego’s dangerous flash flood on Monday may not be the state’s last such event of the next couple of weeks, as a weather pattern favorable to atmospheric rivers takes shape across the Pacific Ocean.
El Niño is here, but California isn’t seeing the impact, at least not yet. Joe Sirard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Los Angeles, says precipitation for the current water year is generally lagging behind averages.
