Floods

If you want a reminder that the most vulnerable among us often bear the brunt of catastrophe, all you have to do is look at what happened in Pajaro, Calif.The small town flooded Friday night after a levee containing the Pajaro River broke due to the heavy downpours brought by California’s latest atmospheric river storm, stranding its residents, many of whom are migrant farmworkers. A second levee breeched Monday.The tragedy here is that officials had known for decades that the levee could be breached but chose not to do…

PAJARO, Calif. —  California’s 11th atmospheric river storm of the season barreled through a beleaguered state Tuesday, dropping more rain and snow and sending thousands of residents once again scrambling for higher ground. At least 16 locations along major rivers were overflowing their banks as the high-impact storm moved south through the state, including areas along the Salinas, Sacramento and Merced rivers. The Pajaro River, which suffered a levee breach from a similar storm last week, continued to spill water onto…

Disruption by floods to the road connection to Aberdeen, Hunter Valley. Credit: NSW Surf Lifesaving, Author provided Australia and New Zealand have both faced a series of devastating floods triggered by climate change and the return of the La Niña weather pattern. So it makes sense that Australia has now sent disaster crews to help with the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. …

Global sea surface temperature fluctuations including the El Niño Southern Oscillation impact interannual variability in the flow of large rivers such as Amazon and Congo. a Regions for calculating El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indices (Niño 1 + 2, Niño 3, Niño 3.4 and Niño 4) and Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Index (DMI), and two hydrological regions (Amazon River basin and Congo River basin). The colors shown on the ocean are the annual sea surface…

Those words aptly describe the scene I encountered in January, some 70 years after the novel’s publication. Drought seemed a distant memory; the green hillsides contrasted with the Salinas’ swift, muddy current. Along River Road, I met a couple taking their morning walk on a muddy path along the swollen Salinas. In the nearly 30 years they’ve lived in town, the man told me, he has never seen the Salinas so large—though, he added, in decades past, the river did carry a larger and more consistent flow. “There used to be a…

Trends of ice-dammed GLOF discharges between 1900 and 2021. Posterior trends from Bayesian quantile regression of reported V0 (orange) and Qp (blue) with time. Dark and light colors are trends for the median and 90th percentile (that is, 10% largest), respectively, for 1900–2021; gray densities are trends for 1990–2021. Black lines are 95% HDIs and circles are medians of the posterior distributions. Trends refer to log10-transformed values of V0 and Qp,…

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Feb. 15, and Cupid is gone for another year. Bring on the leprechauns. I’m Anita Chabria, a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, and your guide for the day to what’s interesting, important or at least gossip-worthy. When torrential rains left parts of California underwater a few weeks ago, the tiny town of Planada was one of the hardest hit. You’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it — I hadn’t. But for the 4,000 or so mostly Hispanic…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The clean-up from Auckland's devastating floods last week is just beginning but insurance companies will need to start thinking about what the record-breaking weather event will mean for future coverage. Over 24 hours, 249mm of rain fell across the Auckland region—well above the previous record of…

The drenching storms that hit California in recent weeks represented a long-sought opportunity for Helen Dahlke, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of California, Davis. Dahlke has been studying ways to recharge the state’s severely depleted groundwater by diverting swollen rivers into orchards and fields and letting the water seep deep into aquifers. But carrying out such plans requires heavy precipitation—which had been scarce. This week, however,…

A dog swept away by floodwaters in San Bernardino County, California was rescued by firefighters with the help of an Apple AirTag. Seamus, a 1-year-old Australian Shepherd, was equipped with the AirTag and a more conventional ID tag when he fell into the rapid floodwaters that swept him away. "He got away from me, and he just went down into this drainage," Seamus' owner Emilie Brill told ABC7 New York (opens in new tab). "The water was going so fast. I think all it took was one paw in that water, and he was gone."The…