Atmospheric river

Nearly 400,000 people in the U.S. were still without power across the country Wednesday morning as wild winter weather pummeled both coasts.According to PowerOutage.us, which collects utility data on outages, more than 196,000 people on the East Coast were facing outages, while nearly 188,000 people in California didn’t have power. Both coasts faced historic deluges—rain in the West, snow in the East.In California, the state’s 11th atmospheric river of the season brought widespread chaos on Tuesday, as wild winds and…

California has been grappling with storm after storm since November. The state, which was just up until recently plagued by extreme ongoing drought, is now instead at the mercy of too much rainfall all at once. The most recent, still ongoing storm is yet another atmospheric river, a common type of weather event for the West Coast wherein water vapor condensed over the ocean is pulled onshore by air currents and thermal gradients. Beginning Monday and and continuing through Wednesday yet more rain and snow has been falling…

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.California is no stranger to big swings between wet and dry weather. The “atmospheric river” storms that have battered the state this winter are part of a system that has long interrupted periods of drought with huge bursts of rain — indeed, they provide somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all precipitation on the West Coast.The parade of storms that has struck California in recent months has dropped more than 30 trillion…

State officials say California’s snowpack is the highest it’s been in decades for early February, the Los Angeles Times reported.The California Department of Water Resources conducted the second manual snowpack survey of 2023 yesterday at Phillips Station near Lake Tahoe. Officials found 85.5 inches of snow depth. That’s 193% above average for the snow depth for the location for this time of year, according to a statement from the Department. Last month,Water Resources officials found 55.5 inches of snow depth. The…

Gov. Gavin Newsom inside a damaged restaurant in Capitola in Santa Cruz County on Tuesday, January 10.Photo: Nic Coury (AP)In a briefing on Tuesday afternoon, Governor Gavin Newsom told Californians to prepare for more rain.“We’re not out of the woods,” Newsom told reporters. “We expect these storms to continue until at least the 18th. We expect, at minimum, three more of these atmospheric rivers in different shapes and forms. The magnitude of this is not isolated.” Gov. Gavin Newsom inside a damaged restaurant in…

2022 has been a year chock-full of severe weather worldwide, from heat waves and drought to hurricanes and floods. Even as we reach the end of December, the weather extremes haven’t let up.A so-called “atmospheric river” is dumping heavy precipitation along the West Coast from Oregon through California. At low elevations, that water is falling as rain, but in the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains, snow is set to accumulate.Downpours could bring up to an inch of rain per hour, National Weather Service forecaster, William…