The atmospheric rivers that pummeled California are a far cry from what a series of extreme storms could potentially bring, climate scientist Daniel Swain said at a legislative hearing on Wednesday that explored the impacts of the recent storm sequence.
“We’re nowhere near the kinds of events that we think are possible in a warming climate,” said Swain, a researcher at UCLA and The Nature Conservancy.
Recent rains could mean a more flexible water budget for San Diego as state authorities announced increased water deliveries throughout California.
The state will allocate additional water deliveries to some 29 public water agencies, delivering 30 percent of requested water supplies after initially projecting only five percent delivery.
Weeks of historic rainfall in California won’t be enough to end a severe drought, but it will provide public water agencies serving 27 million people with much more water than the suppliers had been told to expect a month ago, state officials announced Thursday.
The Department of Water Resources said public water agencies will now get 30% of what they had asked for, up from the 5% officials had previously announced in December.
Tens of thousands of golf fans are watching the world’s top golfers tee off at the Farmers Insurance Open. The tournament sits on towering cliffs that stand starkly against the picturesque backdrop of the Pacific Ocean.
But in that backdrop sits a worrying reminder of the tremendous power of Mother Nature — one that has forced the golf community to reevaluate its relationship with the environment.
The recent series of atmospheric rivers dumped enough rain and snow on Northern California to give us hope that the end of the drought may be near. California’s Department of Water Resources is reporting that the state’s snow water equivalent, or how much water the snowpack is expected to yield, is almost double what we expect at this time of year. According to department officials, it’s “the best start to our snowpack in over a decade.”
Now that the shock of a series of January storms has worn off, Los Angeles County officials face a herculean chore: Five reservoirs along south-facing San Gabriel Mountain slopes are filled with so much debris and soupy mud that they pose a flood risk to the communities below.
Californians have suddenly turned their attention from drought to flooding.
The future likelihood of a series of huge atmospheric rivers in California, a so-called ARk storm scenario, seems to be a certainty. Atmospheric rivers channel moist tropical air towards the West Coast, where mountains condense it to rain and snow. Over the last few weeks, California has suffered through a sneak peak of its devastating potential.
As California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic rains the state has experienced throughout its history and not the result of global warming.
Although scientists are still studying the size and severity of storms that killed 19 people and caused up to $1 billion in damage, initial assessments suggest the destruction had more to do with California’s historic drought-to-deluge cycles, mountainous topography and aging flood infrastructure than it did with climate-altering greenhouse gasses.
Many years ago, scientists predicted climate change would result in more intense weather swings, the likes of which California is currently experiencing: extended stretches of drought interrupted by periods of hard rains.
Now as before, people raise the same question when atmospheric rivers hit and massive storm runoff flows into the ocean: Why can’t we capture more of that and store it for the dry seasons?
The storms that have been battering California offer a glimpse of the catastrophic floods that scientists warn will come in the future and that the state is unprepared to endure.
Giant floods like those that inundated the Central Valley in 1861 and 1862 are part of California’s natural cycle, but the latest science shows that the coming megafloods, intensified by climate change, will be much bigger and more destructive than anything the state or the country has ever seen.
