While California and Nevada remain virtually drought-free, climate experts say extreme heat and wildfire risk may continue plaguing the West for months.
Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said during a webinar Monday that ongoing heat events across the West present a major risk to vulnerable communities, despite a good water supply outlook for the region.
After a year of dominance, El Niño’s wrath has come to end — but its climate-churning counterpart, La Niña, is hot on its heels and could signal a return to dryness for California.
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, sometimes referred to as ENSO. The climate pattern in the tropical Pacific is the single largest driver of weather conditions worldwide, and has been actively disrupting global temperatures and precipitation patterns since its arrival last summer.
Known for its glowing swaths of yellow, orange and red, the U.S. Drought Monitor has warned farmers, residents and officials throughout the nation of impending water scarcity every week since 1999.
Backed by data on soil moisture, temperature, snow cover, meltwater runoff, reservoir levels and more, the map has become an essential instrument for determining the outlook of water supplies, declaring drought emergencies and deciding where and when government aid should be distributed, among other things.
A blizzard that pummeled California over the weekend has brought good news regarding the state’s drought outlook. The massive storm started late last week and brought more than 100 inches of snow to some high-elevation areas. The blizzard followed a slew of atmospheric rivers that brought a deluge of rain to the state.
In the minds of many Californians, El Niño has long loomed as a rainmaker of epic proportions. In 1982-83, the Pacific climate pattern caused storms that pounded the state’s shoreline, damaging 1,000 homes between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border and washing the tip of the Santa Monica Pier out to sea.
Sept. 30 marks the end of a water year to remember in California.
With the new water year kicking off Oct. 1, it’s worth looking back at the water year that was from record snowfall to landfalling tropical storms and everything in between.
Fall has only just begun, but it’s not too soon to look ahead to winter, especially since this one may look drastically different than recent years because of El Niño.
This winter will be the first in a few years to feel the effects of the phenomenon, which has a sizable impact on the weather during the coldest months of the year.
Eight locations along the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts experienced a record surge in high-tide flooding days last year, a trend intensified by rising sea levels and weather patterns that El Niño is expected to escalate in 2024, NOAA said Tuesday.
Coastal communities are expected to face three times as many high-tide, or “sunny day,” flooding instances through next April, compared to two decades ago, agency officials said in a press call.
Climate scientists are bracing for potentially lengthy El Niño and La Niña events, according to a new study revealing how the underlying mechanism for climate variability is responding to increased greenhouse gas emissions in unpredicted ways and inducing El Niño-like conditions after volcanic eruptions.
The research published in Nature Wednesday details recently discovered trends of the “Pacific Walker Circulation,” (PWC) an atmospheric phenomenon relating to east-west circulation along the equatorial Pacific.
El Niño almost here, the global shift is likely to stick around until this winter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week. After an unusual three-year La Niña, all signs are pointing to changes in weather patterns for 2023.
