And the rains and snows keep coming
Starting in December, we were in the Pineapple Express where a steady stream of heavy rainstorms were coming from Hawaii and drenching the state.
After that we switched to the Arctic Express where a continuous set of cold storms were hitting us from the colder North Pacific. This built up the snowpack in the Sierras and Southern California mountains to historic levels, and turned parts of California which rarely get any snow into a picturesque winter wonderland. https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2023/March-23/March-2023-Snow-Survey Snow levels got down to 1000 feet in the north and 3,000 feet in Southern California. Light fluffy stuff great for skiing, but so much of it that people in mountain communities could not get out of their homes, and their towns just did not have enough snow removal equipment to clear the roads and dig out the stranded. A few people have died, and neighbors have banded together to help each other because local and state resources have not been able to get there in a timely fashion.
The state’s reservoirs that irrigate California’s crops and hydrate 39 million Californians are now filling up after years of severe drought. https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/california-reservoir-levels-drought-rain-17816212.php The Oroville Spillway for our state’s second largest reservoir is now releasing lake waters to keep the dam from being overtopped. Several years ago, heavy winter rains very nearly took out the entire Oroville Dam and all the downriver communities.
In the last few days, the Pineapple Express has returned, drenching the state with warm wet rains and the Sierras with wet heavy snow, not the fluffy stuff. It is melting the snowpack at lower elevations and causing floods in the foothills and the Valley. I got soaked through to my skin through a rain jacket and heavy fleece, so yesterday I finally succumbed and bought a proper yellow rain gear appropriate to this weather. We got 2.5 inches; the Santa Cruz Mountains got 12 inches in the same 24 hours. Today I was cleaning out all the gutters and drains; finally put on the new rain gear and stayed warm and dry and just had a bowl of delicious chicken soup and a hot tea for lunch.
Around us the ground is completely saturated, so the new rains just run off into rivulets and creeks or pool in flat low-lying areas. The combo of runoff and snow melt flood as they come down from the Sierra foothills and into the Central Valley, but it has not yet become a widespread catastrophe; no major levees that protect large cities like Sacramento have failed. https://weather.com/news/weather/video/river-towns-in-californias-sierra-nevada-foothills-overrun-by-flooding-after And the Yolo Bypass, a safety valve for floods along the Sacramento River, has not yet had to be opened to divert the rising flood waters. https://water.ca.gov/News/Blog/2023/Jan-23/When-the-River-Rises-Weirs-Get-to-Work We had our first levee failure in the farming community of Pajaro in Monterrey on Friday night/Saturday morning forcing many local farmworkers from their homes. https://apnews.com/article/california-atmospheric-river-storm-2677c9eeb138f2a672a2596ef4b1563e
This weekend’s coming storms are supposed to be smaller, but the threats of flooding and the evacuations will stay through early next week when we get another big deluge from the Pineapple Express. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/11/weather/california-atmospheric-river-flood-saturday/index.html