Severe storms brought on by this weather phenomenon have dumped 30tn gallons of water across the state
What is an atmospheric river? The basics
A tree, blown over by 50 mph winds, crushes a parked car in El Camino Real in Burlingame, California.The storms are supercharged by warm water vapor that evaporates off the Pacific Ocean, loading them with enough water to rival the average flow at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi River, with up to 15 times its volume. Moving with weather systems, they appear as a trail of wispy clouds that can stretch for hundreds of miles, ready to unleash deluges wherever they make landfall.
“Whether there are too many or too few determines whether parts of California are above or below normal in precipitation,” said Dr Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes and researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “When you get a couple of them back to back, especially if the watersheds are already very wet, we start to see the pile-on effects.
Along with amplifying risks from rain-related floods, warmer downpours on the snowpack also spark rapid runoff concerns. It also could eat into what California considers a water savings account of sorts, by rapidly melting the snow that sits high atop mountain ranges and typically trickles more slowly through systems during spring and summer.
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