California has been hit by repeated storms fueled by torrents of moisture called atmospheric rivers that will only intensify in a warming climate
California is taking a beating from what the National Weather Service has called a “seemingly never ending parade” of strong storm systems, which started late last December and are still coming. Called atmospheric rivers, they are long, narrow currents of exceptionally wet air that shoot across the ocean, capable of dumping massive volumes of rain or snow on landfall.
More atmospheric rivers are predicted in the coming days, raising fears of flash floods across California—and of catastrophic mud and debris flows where recent wildfires have created 21 burn scars around the state. Its governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on January 4, and the White House issued a presidential emergency declaration for California on January 8.
Often we try to use El Niño and La Niña—large climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean—as proxies for the forecast. The simple narrative is that El Niño is wet, and La Niña is dry. This is the third year of La Niña, and expectations were set up by the first two years, when winters were not very wet.The simple narrative is not necessarily true. Northern California is on the cusp of the wet-dry pattern. It’s kind of a crapshoot; it could go either way.
Mountains usually wring the water out of atmospheric rivers. But a lot of the moisture from last week’s storms in California made it to Minnesota, dropping a foot and a half of snow. There’s so much moisture in the system; it’s anomalous that there’s so much.The first storms saturated the soil—it’s soaked like a sponge, holding all the water it can—and any more will just run off. Rivers, creeks and reservoirs are also fuller, so we can get flooding.
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