A big news story is the storm delivering large amounts of rain to California. SF Gate has pictures and more on the storm that is causing floods, power outages, and headaches for travelers. The National Weather Service is tweeting pictures of storm damage and weather info. NPR has a story on the storm with a lot of good links.
What makes this news story of more than a little interest is not just rains coming in after years of severe drought. The question is, is this a repeat of a historic weather pattern that hits the West Coast roughly every 200 years? Scientific American has a report by Mark Fischetti that gets into the mechanics of the "atmospheric river" that is delivering volumes of moisture-laden air in from the Pacific.
An atmospheric river is a conveyor belt of vapor that extends thousands of miles from out at sea, carrying as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers. It strikes as a series of storms that arrive for days or weeks on end. Each storm can dump inches of rain or feet of snow. Meteorologists sometimes call small occurrences “pineapple expresses,” because they tend to flow in a straight line from around Hawaii toward the U.S. West Coast...
There are some graphics at the link that show how it works. It's pretty impressive - and sometimes it... doesn't stop for a while.
...In 1861 an atmospheric river that brought storms for 43 days turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, 800,000 cattle drowned and the state went bankrupt. A similar disaster today would be much more devastating, because the region is much more populated and it is the single largest food producer in the U.S.
An article behind a paywall explores in detail what such a storm could do today. (I believe
this is it as a pdf file; It's definitely worth a look.)
A 2012 Scientific American article looked at the 1861 flood, and is mind-boggling in the descriptions of destruction back then. It's something most Californians are not aware of - though this latest storm may change that.
I posted a diary about this back in June 2013 along with some related information. To quote from that diary,
Climate change is not a joke. The Republican war on government and science means that we not only are stuck with crumbling infrastructure, the infrastructure we have is not built to deal with the increasing shift and variability in weather patterns we are starting to experience. Even as conservatives try to get government down to a size where it can be "drowned in a bathtub" we're going to be facing potential disaster on a scale that can only be addressed at the federal level. Investments in water supplies, water and sewer projects, drainage, agriculture, energy, development policies - all of that needs to done with an eye to the New Normal we're headed for.
And that was before America elected what may well be the worst Congress yet. An indication of how government can make a huge difference is coming out of the Philipines, which was just hit by a monster typhoon. A typhoon that hit a year earlier killed thousands; this latest just 20. Why the difference? Lessons were learned and acted on by the government.
Via New Scientist,
...the biggest difference, say international rescue agencies, is that this time the government was prepared. More than 1000 evacuation shelters were ready and stocked with food, with an estimated 1.7 million people kept safe in public buildings or on high ground.
It's too soon to say if California is going to experience another megaflood - it would take the Pineapple Express running for quite a few more days or weeks for that to happen. For now, the rain is badly needed and is only part way into breaking the drought. Keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best.
http://youtu.be/...