Over the last few days California has been hit by a series of winter storms that have been driven by an El Nino aimed Jetstream pattern that has pushed further to the south and with more zonal flow than usual.
It has been comical to watch some of the television news coverage of these events related to weather especially in Los Angeles. Incidence of minor street flooding and stalled cars from people that were unobservant enough to drive thru knee deep water at road speed turned into almost comical rescue events.
On Fox News 11 in Los Angeles there were scenes of people on top of the cars in flooded intersections avoiding knee deep water. Television news helicopters were covering one such intersection, and as a person got off the top of their car and started walking towards the curb through knee deep water the commentator said “and there is a person making a break for safety! ”
Elsewhere interstate 5 had snow at the summit over the Tehachapi Mountains yesterday and that called the number of people that weren’t paying attention to the weather to get caught up in that drama.
All in all though from what I’ve seen in Southern California it’s all pretty much business as usual for an El Nino winter it’s just that people haven’t been used to such weather for quite a long time.
Of course that hasn’t stopped some pundits from declaring all of this as being driven by “climate change” and claiming that “severe weather is getting worse due to climate change”.
But those who are in the know and who have studied the California weather for decades know that this is no extraordinary event nor is it connected in any way to climate change it’s just a natural pattern this part of ocean cycles that have been going on for millennia.
They are getting a break in California from the train of storms now but the next one will be coming through on Monday hopefully by then some people will have wised up on how to deal with plain old weather events.
67 years living in SoCal and experienced repeats of weather cycles several times over. This is no different but the reporting has changed. In the last 20 years “Storm Watch” has become a joke line for locals. Water use, and misuse, becomes quickly forgotten when the snow pack builds and the reservoirs fill. Our governor is obsessed with Climate Change to the point of being psychotic yet doesn’t understand the significance of water needs for a growing population and industry. He isn’t dubbed “Governor Moonbeam” for no reason.
“Moonbeam” is a misnomer for Jerry Brown. Moonbeams are bright. Brown is an idiot.
+ 100
Meanwhile,way across the Pacific in the land of Oz, El Nino and otherwise normal summer weather on our east coast is producing heavy rain floolwed by …. wait for it … a hot spell. In SUMMER in Oz … who would EVER have thunk it!!! But WTHek, Peter Hannam, the resident alarmist churnalist at Fairfax Media is singing in the rain, crying in the sun and generally whipping up schlokk and horror. Talk about eco terrorism.
Every time I read some moronic article about how powerful this El Nino is, and just how things are so much worse than ever before, I can’t help but tell them about the Great Flood of 1862, which apparently was not El Nino related and occurred decades before anthropogenic CO2 started “causing” severe weather never before seen in California.
They ignore me.
Richard, I cannot do no El Nino records going back to the 1861 flood. LA got 66 inches of rain, most of it 45 days. One alarmist told me this would not produce a flood today, as they may have gotten 1.5 inches everyday, but now, well the August LA grapevine moonsoon was a once every five hundred year event.
In 1861 grass valley Ca. got nine inches in one day on already super saturated ground. El Nino or not, it was an El Nino like pineapple express, and, if repeated today would overload our resivors and flood controls.
Wait, didn’t El Ninos just start after the advent of the SUV and Coal Burning Power Plants? Clearly CO2 is the cause of El Nino.
Sorry, late to the party, but want to comment about “What makes a drought a drought”. Locally they measure drought not by the rainfall but by the levels in the nearby lakes. So even though it rained us half to death here in Texas we were still officially in a drought until the lakes finally started flooding. Weeks after that, some localities admitted we were not in a drought, although my area insisted it was a drought for months more. Some areas are retaining their watering restrictions on the grounds that we just do not have enough water despite floods.
Now if you think about this, we pull water from the lakes for drinking water. The more people you have, the more water you pull. Many Texas cities are growing faster than ever… So droughts are increasing in these city areas as lakes are drained faster each year. This seems so simple, but we don’t build any new lakes – we just keep adding people.
The end result is lakes are getting low faster and so we report more droughts – even when the rainfall appears to be normal. Now this doesn’t account for rural areas – there are and always will be reoccurring droughts in Texas, but you will see more and more droughts reported, so it MUST be climate change.
Robert of Texas
You are forgetting two major differences between TX droughts (and the water supplies replenishing your water supplies) and GA-AL-TN-north FL droughts (and the water supplies replenishing their water) and CA droughts (and the water supplies replenishing their water supplies.)
In GA-AL-TN, almost all water is surface runoff, a little bit of snow run-off, and a tiny bit of underground pumped water. (Mid FL has a LOT of pumped water from their aquifers!) Local rainfall IS the water supply, and the local lakes ARE the current and next year’s water supplies. No rain for two-three years? No drinking. None. There is no other reserves, no other way of getting water into the region. No aquifers.
TX has some run-off water, but it is so large that no one statement is right for the whole state. Mid-TX pumps water up from the Edwards Aquifer, but THAT water comes from the limestone-beds trickling through water from an entirely different area uphill in the plateua and Hill Country. A few lakes (Austin, Colorado river, Blanco, etc) but they are small. Creeks are semi-monthly (Piedernales is a “river” really? You gonna dam the Salado Creek in San Antonio? The San Antonio River too? ) So, what water is pumped is from two-three-four years previous. And IS being pumped much faster than it is being re-filled by the last few rain storms – most of which run off anyway too fast to soak in. (The reason many small dams are made: To let the water stop and soak in before it evaporates.) Some lakes in the east are surface water sources for cities. Much of the state is simply dry when it doesn’t rain. Wet when it does rain.
CA is two cases: In-state runoff into lakes (north and Sierra mountains). Snow melt and rain. NO summer rain at all. This year’s water is (at most!) good for only two-three years in the lakes in the mountains. Then it is gone to the San Francisco cities. The rest of the water is imported from EACH year’s snow and rain across the almost entire southwest region. As mentioned above, then it goes to the southern CA cities. Maybe two year’s reserves in the Colorado River lakes.
You dress a lady newscaster in fishing waders, stand her in ankle deep water, have her speak breathlessly about the horrible tragedy. At least once I saw yagoddabefoggnkiddnme body language that belied the message.
Hola! Dees being normal qui mo sabe. In the 1983 Nino they had to put a four foot plywood extension atop Glen Canyon Dam. The overflow tubes on either side blew chunks of first concrete and then the supporting rock. We came breathtakingly close to undermining the lateral support for the dam and having Lake Powell exit to the Sea of Cortez.
It’s not too late for a serious Nino pattern to develop, but time is running out. This weeks 6 inch rain pattern was undermined by an “outside slider” outbreak of polar air like the the outbreaks that have defined the season so far.
Looks like some more inside silders may be on the way. Getting quite meridional now. Meridional is “the Anti-El Nino.
Pretty much. In spite of his determination to this run of the mill nino into the judgement day, Daniel Swain at California Weather Blog posted this CFS which predicted the current episode very well, but predicts a resumption of cold outbreaks off the coast.
http://i1.wp.com/www.weatherwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/output_y8bSfq.gif
Wasn’t AGW causing the LACK of rain in CA?? Didn’t they have the local equivalent of Flannery doing the “dams will never fill again” routine?
I-5 does not go anywhere near the Tehachapi Mountains, perhaps you meant the Grapevine @ur momisugly I-5? Tehachapi has Hwy 58.
Here’s a link to the worst flooding in California history and it occurred in 1861. It was a 41 day rain storm.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atmospheric-rivers-california-megaflood-lessons-from-forgotten-catastrophe/
Using rain barrels or local cisterns to capture rain water depends on the type of soil to be able to recharge water basins. In parts of Los Angeles there is impermeable clay soil. Near the foothills there are alluvial fans which are quite permeable.
California’s new law allowing local flood control agencies to get into the water production business by capturing and storing water from flood control channels makes no economic sense. Go to page 4-2 of the City of Pasadena’s “Integrated Water Resources Plan”.
Link: ww2.cityofpasadena.net/waterandpower/waterplan/PasadenaWIRPFinalApproved0130111.pdf.
Stormwater runoff capture could cost up to $46,000 per acre foot of water (a football field of water one foot high) compared to $209 per acre foot for diverting existing water from streams to a water treatment plant. Even worse, stormwater capture could only yield maybe 44 acre feet of water (enough for 88 households or 264 persons) while local surface water diversion could yield 2,164 acre feet of water (enough for 4,328 households or 12,984 people).
Rain barrels and storing oil laden water from flood channels is a feel good solution like installing solar panels that require massive subsidies, result in instability of the power grid, and subsidize the rich at the expense of the middle class (the poor get low power rates). Rain barrels and solar panels lessen the social alienation and powerlessness people feel in dealing with massive bureaucratic power companies (So Cal Edison, PG&E, LA Dept. Water & Power, etc.) but is entirely uneconomic, as are most “environmental” solutions to water and energy problems).
Oh, wow man.
What a bring down.
“El Nino aimed Jetstream pattern”
Watching most news, one should believe that these storms are creations of El Nino. El Nino instigates storm development in Siberia and Gulf of Alaska? Shifts the pattern of the polar northern jet stream? It can do anything!!
Maybe the El Nino variable added a little more lower atmospheric moisture to these northern storms as they swept down below Wash. and Oregon, guided by the current whims of the jet stream. But for major temperate latitude west-moving El Nino evaporation-onto-continent action, let’s hope the “Pineapple Express” occurs. That will be major “El Nino Year” moisture moving.
To be fair, some of the systems last week got juiced by the subtropical jet, since the jet has been cycling between zonal and split. Just as the jet was reunifying there was a jet streak down in SoCal. But now the subtropical jet is sliding equatorward, well down into Baja now.
All natural variability
The drought in California was beginning to be frightening for some people. Now that we are getting this rain, and above average snow in the mountains, you’d think that people would be relieved and smiling over it all. But no, tv news has to slam your senses with a dark, murky ditch of negativity.
But I’m very happy, and thankful to God. The rain smells great. And seeing the clean puddles of water is fascinating. There’s thick green grass everywhere. 🙂
In California, normal rainfall is drought level. Every few years we get heavy rains to recharge the system. In other words, our mode is well below median rainfall. (In Los Angeles over the last 135 years, 60% have had below average rainfall.) This is nothing new.
http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we13.htm
We get most of our water from up North. As you can see, the seasons ending in ’77 and ’24 were both MUCH drier than the last few years:
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/precipapp/get8SIPrecipIndex.action
The problem is that our population has doubled over the last 30 odd years, but we haven’t increased our storage capacity to get us through the lean times, so we have to hope the big storms arrive on schedule.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
Our draw down problem has been made worse by increased environmental releases for the fish and for Mexico and decreased allotments from the Colorado. I’m fine with environmental releases (especially during years of plenty) and the river should have some water by the time it gets to Mexico, but we should be planning accordingly, building more storage upstream. I’d also like to see more desalination facilities. Given that fresh water can be created from sea water for less than I’m currently paying for tap water, I say build desal for the big coastal cities and let the farmers fight over the cheap inland water.
Ashby commented:
+1 SoCal is a desert
Except: ” I’d also like to see more desalination facilities.” Poor use of energy and money that creates other problems while only partially solving one. The only time desalination is effective is when there’s no other source of water. Water management and increased storage in the long term is the answer.