The final days of winter will bring more stormy weather across much of California.
A storm started off the weekend along the northern California coast, helping to produce snow and blizzard conditions across the Cascades and northern Rockies.
The storm will shift south along the California coast through early week, bringing precipitation to central and southern California.
It was the summer of 2003 in Europe, and, for a while, it seemed as if Earth’s weather system had broken down. For weeks a huge mass of air stalled over the continent, slowly subsiding and suppressing cloud formation, leaving day after day of brilliantly clear skies. The mercury rose, and a record-breaking heat wave gripped countries including France and Germany, causing 70,000 deaths. Then, as abruptly as it set in, the persistent atmospheric block eased, and high winds brought relief.
Few weather phenomena are as widely experienced—but poorly understood—as an atmospheric block. When a block arises, typically at the western edge of a continent, the jet stream splits, trapping a blob of seemingly static air thousands of kilometers across. Such blocks can last for weeks, and drive heat waves, drought, and winter cold snaps.
Much needed rain will finally return to California and will likely end a month-plus dry streak in San Francisco and Sacramento. Dry conditions have prevailed across most of California since late January due to the upper-level pattern. A strong area of high pressure aloft near California has pushed the jet stream and storm track northward into the Pacific Northwest.
The persistence of this pattern has resulted in drought conditions during the wet season. Nearly 70% of the Golden State is abnormally dry, and about a third of the state is in moderate drought, according to the latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Some communities in California just experienced the driest February ever, and there’s around an 80 percent chance the state will enter a full-blown drought this year.
If that happens, it could be the third-driest year in over a century, according to modeling by the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
But even though around a quarter of California is undergoing moderate drought conditions experts say it’s too early to panic — they say a second year of drought is where things get dicey.
“The first year of a drought is really mostly a wake-up call,” said Jay Lund, the center’s director. “It will be prudent, if this turns out to be a dry year, for us to prepare for it to be a longer drought.”
Winters are getting warmer and shorter. Here’s the impact in your area.
“Dear Sara,
I would like to read your prediction of the effects of climate change on the traditional four weather seasons.”
After a slow start to California’s wet winter season, a series of storms that hammered the state at the tail end of 2019 dumped enough snow on the Sierra Nevada to kick off the new year with a solid snowpack.
Surveyors with the California Department of Water Resources trudged through a snow-covered field Thursday at the department’s Phillips station — fresh powder crunching beneath their snowshoes —and plunged a hollow pole into the snowpack for the first monthly measurement that serves as an important marker for the state’s water supply.
Last year came in and went out like a wet lion in San Diego County. In between, it was a relatively tranquil, although not uneventful weather year.
Southern California’s wettest December in nearly a decade quashed any danger lingering from destructive wildfires in fall, but experts warn that red flag conditions could return as early as April.
The year began amid the ashes of the deadliest wildfire in California history. Then came torrential rains, the superbloom, a marine heat wave, and fires again.
They are events that foreshadow a future pattern of more extreme wildfires and rainstorms as climate change drives the Earth’s temperatures higher. The 2019 events prompted now familiar responses from politicians confronted with catastrophe across the state: disaster relief money, funding for scientific studies, and recriminations against bankrupt utility Pacific Gas and Electric.
In its first year of operation, an innovative stormwater capture and re-use system at San Diego International Airport has collected more than two million gallons.
The airport collects rain that falls on the roof of the Terminal 2 Parking Plaza, diverting it from becoming runoff that can pollute San Diego Bay. This water is fed into the airport’s central plant, where it is used in place of potable water to help heat and cool the terminals.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
