A storm out of the northeast Pacific Ocean drenched much of San Diego County before dawn on Wednesday.
Skies are expected to be dry at 5 p.m. when Oregon and North Carolina compete in the Holiday Bowl at Petco Park in downtown San Diego.
An expanded Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program began last month as a result of the unexpected “bomb cyclone” in October 2021 that hit North America’s West Coast, followed by another atmospheric river less than a month later that caused severe flooding in Washington.
“Climatologically, November and December can bring some of the worst floods for that part of the world,” said research meteorologist Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Ralph leads the AR Recon program, along with Vijay Tallapragada, Ph.D., Senior Scientist at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the California Dept. of Water Resources, NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, and the U.S. Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron “Hurricane Hunters.”
A strong low-pressure system associated with an upper-level shortwave trough will impact much of the US West Coast today through Thursday, with the development of an atmospheric river over Northern California. After the initial AR, a second low-pressure system will develop offshore and travel down the coast, bringing another round of precipitation to the region Friday into Sunday.
Even with the recent wet weather in San Diego County, climate change is rapidly accelerating in California, according to a new state report.
Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, explained how that can affect the state’s water supply.
“Our long term deficits are still significant in Southern California and especially in Northern California. And the overall water supply being at its lowest state on record for the Colorado system and near record lows even for California,” Tardy said.
Drought has engulfed large swaths of the country, threatening parts of the nation’s food and power supply. And it’s getting worse.
More than 80 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing unusually dry conditions or full-on drought, which is the largest proportion since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking 20 years ago.
As of October 1st, the rain calendar was reset and we are officially in the rainy season now through April. But La Niña is still in place for the third year in a row with its cooler sea surface temperatures, something that rarely happens.
While we are entering what’s considered our rainy season, San Diego is also potentially heading into its third year of the drought, the state of California is in its fourth year of the drought and it’s the third year in a row of La Niña.
Water supplies are dipping and the outlook for the coming rainy season is iffy at best. That’s the main takeaways from Thursday’s online drought town hall held by Sonoma County.
Water managers are preparing for a warm winter, a worse drought and a chance of biblical floods. As California discovered last year, the weather can swing wildly from one extreme to the next each month—offering little reliability for farmers planting winter crops or planning for the next irrigation season.
Conditions are lining up for a rare third year of La Niña, which tends to bring heavier precipitation to the Pacific Northwest and drier weather to most of California. Last year two atmospheric rivers delivered the bulk of the water supply in October and December, with total precipitation adding up to 76% of average for the water year that ended last month. But the last two winters have demonstrated that an adequate snowpack can disappear in just weeks under spring heat waves.
The National Weather Service in Seattle posted a graphic this week that contains a startling fact. Since July 1, Seattle, a city synonymous with rain, has been drier than San Diego, a city synonymous with clear, dry skies.
From July 1 to Oct. 9, San Diego recorded 0.65 inches of rain. Seattle, 1,250 miles to the north, had only 0.48 inches.
From record-breaking heat waves to historic rainstorms, September was nothing short of a meteorological roller-coaster ride and the Bay Area was given a front-row seat.
This roller coaster of temperatures and intense back-and-forth between extreme heat and strong rains has come to a halt, though. A quiet, mostly dry pattern looks to be taking center stage for October as California is set to enter its third consecutive year of La Niña. But another weather pattern could shake up our chances of seeing at least one more storm roll into California before the end of the month.
