From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Two years ago, media outlets were headlining strident messages that California had moved into a “megadrought” and that there was little hope for relief.
Story after story claimed that global warming had permanently changed the situation and that California’s reservoirs would remain unfilled.
Fast forward two years and these apocalyptic warnings appear more like a rendition of chicken-little than reliable climate science.
Massive rainfall has hit the Golden State, while we in the Northwest are enjoying a warmer-than-normal winter with less snowpack than normal.
Below is the percent of average precipitation for the last month over the western U.S. Some parts of California have received over 400% of normal!
To illustrate the soggy California situation, below is the accumulated precipitation at Los Angeles since October 1 (the current water year). Brown indicates normal values. LA is now running about 40% above normal
Compare this to Seattle (below). We are slightly above normal. Precipitation-wise we running nearly exactly on climatology. That may surprise some.
As I have described in several previous blogs, we are now experiencing El Nino conditions, which tend to make California very wet, while our area generally experiences near-normal precipitation.
The latest forecast of accumulated precipitation through Tuesday shows a continuation of the pattern with heavy precipitation expected in California. And yes….only modest precipitation over Washington. Oregon enjoys a piece of this wet bounty.
The origin of this wet situation is a strong El Nino low center off of Califonia, illustrated by the upper level (500-hPa pressure, about 18,000 ft) at 10 PM on Monday. The purple shading indicates an unusually strong low. I am getting tired of this pattern.
The current extended prediction of accumulated precipitation through April 1 by the European Center model suggests this pattern is not going away, with very wet conditions over California, but drier than normal in the Washington Cascades (see below).
But what about the Northwest snowpack during the next few months? I will leave that to an upcoming blog.
WUWT addendum. The feature image at the top was taken from the US Drought monitor at: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/ComparisonSlider.aspx
Here’s a slider comparison of 2/15/2022 to 2/13/2024
I hope they are bottling the excess water!
No. They are blowing up dams. Salmon first!
and that is going to do the exact opposite of what they think – it will destroy whatever salmon are already there
That along the southern edge of my Cumbrian farm ran a modest little river.
(Called = the King Water, look it up and was/is a tributary to North Cumbria’s mega river system= the Eden catchment and a notable salmon fishery)
During summertimes, my kids loved to go play in the water and a big fascination was the huuuuuge numbers of tiny little baby fishes.
They swarmed around in the shallows along the ‘beach’ and the water came alive sometimes, there were just so many.
No-one had any idea what sort they were, just = tiddlers
The Bureaucracy had to be involved of course and every year, 3 blokes would arrive and ask if was OK for them to go across the fields to the river and do their Annual Fish Survey.
It was a rhetoric question, they were concerned a bull might be in there and ‘take a dislike’ to them.
They always went to the same spot = a carefully measured 50 metre length of river and they electrifried it.
This (seemingly) stunned the fish in there and they floated on the surface long enough for these blokes to count. Then they recovered and swam away unhurt.
Part of their mission was to report back to the landowner (me) some weeks later what they found and in all the time since father passed away and I was The Landowner, it made truly sad/depressing reading.
Often they counted no fish at all whereas decades ago, dozens in just that short stretch of water.
I did ask them about the ‘tiddlers’ – “What sort of fish were they?” and was told straight away that they were baby salmon
I was utterly gobsmacked, i never in million years guessed they’d be salmon.
But if there were all these 1,000’s of tiny fishes, why did they not count any bigger fish in their annual surveys.
It eventually dawned.
It was that when I first knew the river (early 70’s) and after a ‘rain event’. it took over 24 hours for the water level to rise and even then, it took a massive rainstorm to make any significant torrent.
But for the 2nd half of my ownership, even modest rain turned the river into a horrendous raging torrent of brown muddy water.
Then the really horrible thing dawned: wtf did those tiny little tiddler fish do in those raging tsunamis?
A: They wouldn’t have had a hope in hell and would have all been swept away.
And that is why me and the kids saw all the baby fish and the surveyors saw no bigger fish.
And there is the story of Soil Erosion – huge flocks of sheep further upstream had turned their fields to deserts (cold wet rainy ones) and whenever it rained the river turned into a storm drain.
Precisely the same thing will happen in California when they take away the dams
The bone dry arid landscape will create flash floods which will destroy any fishes that there were in those rivers, just like they did the King Water, also many of the tributaries of the River Eden
everything in this world is now trash junk and wrong
Those rivers existed before the dams were built; that’s why they were built. No one builds dams where rivers don’t exist. The rivers will continue to exist after the dams are destroyed.
And I have no proof, but I’d bet there were lots of fish in those rivers before the dams were built.
Maybe the sheep upstream were really the bigger salmon who were just identifying as sheep?
Man-made dams were constructed for the purpose of storing water and protecting downstream areas as far back as 5000 years ago. Unfortunately, modern politicians just aren’t as smart as those folks were, and in California, they are actually destroying dams.
But then, what would you expect when Sierra Club is a primary advisor and Warren Buffet is requesting (with a carrot) existing dams be destroyed?
Hi Cliff.
Speaking of the Pacific North West, can you tell me what sort of clouds these are please?
Photo taken from Mt Washington BC last Wednesday (14th Feb) at around 1330.
You didn’t ask me . . . but trying to be helpful, they appear to be mostly cirrus clouds (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_cloud for a similar photo), with perhaps some lenticular formation for the clouds in the uppermost part of your photo.
Not uncommon to see in skies over mountains due to the mountain elevations deflecting moisture-carrying horizontal surface winds upward.
aka Mares Tails
A pretty sure sign it’s gonna be raining inside 24 to 36 hours
Aircraft contrails do the same job – if the planes leave monster trails all across the sky it’s gonna rain – it very short or no visible trails – dry weather continuing
We were treated to the same wispy, humped overlapping feathery formations a few days ago, looking west toward the Rockies from Denver area. I think it was Wednesday or Thursday. Snow followed with a storm that dumped three inches yesterday. “Cirrus” means something like feathers or crests. The “atmospheric rivers” from the Pacific seem to have had a moisture “blanketing” effect on Colorado.
The state’s snow water equivalent is all green today – it’s unusual to see all the river basins at or near 100% of normal at the same time.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/data/water/wcs/gis/maps/co_swepctnormal_update.pdf
Thanks for all your answers and info guys.
I thought cirrus (aka mares’ tails), but all of these I’ve previously observed were much higher, and well, whispier.
Plus, these ones from Wednesday only lasted about 45 minutes, then they completely evaporated.
Totally clear blue sky again horizon to horizon.
ALL of the current climate models that make regional-scale predictions have been falsified!
How many federal agencies in the U.S. will publish THAT in the “global warming” section of their official websites?
Answer: Zero!
They called it the worst drought in 1200 years, and referred to an ongoing 20 years of drought.
Mammoth mountain is in the central Sierras, and is a fair barometer for California snow. So I compared the first 20 years of Mammoth snow, (about 1962 to 1982) verses the “Worst drought in 1200 years!) It turnes out that the worst drought in 1200 years had considerably more snow than the first 20 years of Mammoth mountain records, and nobody panicked in those first 20 years.
https://www.mammothmountain.com/on-the-mountain/snowfall-history
Historically California has had two droughts in the last 1200 years that dwarf anything in the past two centuries, each lasting a century or longer, one that caused most of the Oak trees to die.
Computer simulations for climate change say that there should be less La Ninas ( dry) not more.
Another fail for the climate models
Re: media outlets and their headlining strident messages, it’s been well-said many, many years ago:
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”
— Bible, Romans 1:22, King James Version (KJV)
More water, a lot more.
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=39.5;-122.7;4&l=rain-3h&t=20240219/1200
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=39.8;-121.4;4&l=rain-3h&t=20240226/1800
And snow in the mountains.
Thanks for the interesting site link – may I suggest you set your links so they open in a new tab?
According to my sources, we (South Sierra 6500′) are already to 100% for the water year (Oct – Oct). Nice, it’s pretty soggy up here with about a foot of incredibly wet snow on the ground – my trees appear happier. This storm set doesn’t look too impressive. Certainly, it isn’t getting the official media blast like the last one. I think we are due for an inch, inch and a half of percip water.
We’re all going to die!
The ancient Tulare Lake will return permanently.
Eventually.
A typo – I didn’t mean to say that Anasazi experienced a 500 year drought, just that drought drove them away. The longest drought was much earlier in this interglacial period.
Serves them right, they killed all the flora and the fauna
Ma Nature is a real bitch – when she ‘puts the pressure on‘ she means business.
That really does mean/involve ‘pressure’ = High barometric pressure = cyclonic ridges = descending air = Foehn effect heating and the desert then continues to reinforce itself for ever more.
She kicks you out and bolts the door after you’ve gone, Every Single Time
Yep, I make this observation all the time –
“nature” is out to get us, not provide a “safe space” where we can all live happily ever after.
Good report from Cliff Mass. On the slider for drought condition I slammed the cursor to the left so fast that it went into the future. Guess what? It’s going to rain some more. Wait for it.
“to rain some more.”
https://www.accuweather.com/pl/us/san-francisco/94103/weather-radar/347629
Very nice.
“California Enjoys the Northwest’s Water.”
When I lived in Seattle, I heard occasional rumblings about how California benefitted from cheap North Western hydropower, putting up the cost for locals.
Michael,
You can view the types of power available in the NW to send south here:
<a href=”https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx” target=”_blank”>BPA generation and balancing</a>
Next link explains and maps the transmission lines:
<a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie” target=”_blank”>Pacific DC intertie</a>
The northern end – Celilo Converter Station – is near the (now flooded) Celilo Falls, see at:
45.5948, -121.1128
That didn’t work, so copy and paste the URLs.
If you see the tool list at the bottom of the comment box, don’t use your own HTML. It won’t be recognized as such.
Select the text string in your comment you want to mark as a hypertext link, tap the link icon on the tool list, and then paste the URL into the box which appears over the highlighted text.
BPA generation and balancing
Pacific DC intertie
Thank you.
Today’s chart from the BPA shows a very typical situation for this time of year.
Wind and solar are running at less than 15% of nameplate, hydro is doing the heavy lifting of both baseload and diapatchable load following, nuclear and fossil/bio are both acting as baseload supporting actors, lots of electricity is being exported outside of the BPA’s area of load balancing authority.
We here in the US Northwest have lots of hydro to rely upon. But this does not make us immune from the oncoming RE-driven energy calamity which has the Western Interconnect in its crosshairs.
There will also be thunderstorms in California on February 19 and 20.
This turnaround is no surprise since temperature and precipitation variations are the rule with global climates for the most part. Didn’t the US Central Plains and the Canadian Prairies experience extended droughts during the 1930s, and didn’t that period end before World War 2 so that those areas are now among the top agricultural producers in the world? Naturally the climate alarmists chose to omit such facts and tried to make a few dry years seem like the guaranteed rule due to excessive fossil fuel consumption. As usual they were wrong and succeeded in nothing more than convincing people that their predictions are consistently inaccurate.
El Nino has started to fade. It should be gone by summer.
‘The El Niño event breakdown has begun, with a cold ocean anomaly expanding below the surface but still impacting Spring in the U.S. and Canada’https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/el-nino-event-ocean-anomaly-rapid-decline-spring-weather-united-states-canada-fa/
So all that wind and solar solved the climate change problem, right?
The problem with lies is that no matter how long you wait, they don’t become truth, and the passage of time often just demonstrates how untrue they are.
Rain is also the result of climate change. Everything is the result of climate change.
On February 27, El Niño will bring rainfall to the south and east of the US. It will stop raining in California.
Onset of heavy rainfall in northern California.
In San Luis Obispo, we have had 8″ in the past 3 weeks. That’s in my back yard. It’s raining right now and should continue through Tuesday evening with an additional 3.5″.
Colorado river basin running a bit dry, except eastern Utah. I wonder what the snow pack for Western Colorado is running.