Water Gods, Or More Accurately Climate Change Screws Over California Again

Californians were super happy back in December.

The latest 6 to 10 day outlook continues to 
in

Many feet of snow buried the Sierra Nevada range. Inches and inches of rain poured down on the valleys. 

Sure the mountain snow caused some problems with closed roads, isolated people, power outages, avalanches, that kind of thing. In the valleys, there were some flood, some mudslides, some debris flows, some road closures. Sacramento even had its wettest day on record. 

Oh, well, that's life in California. It was all good, since the Golden State experienced drought for years. Would the drought finally end? 

The Fresno Bee has the answer that pretty much everybody in California knows, now that January has closed. 

"Is the drought finally over? Now that we've reached the end of the driest recorded January in Fresno history - barely a trace of rain - and no meaningful precipitation in the February forecast, time to throw that entire premise out the window."

Unfortunately, the next paragraph in the Fresno Bee article feels defeatist, but it reflects what climatologist have been saying would be California's fate under the new climate life we now live with global warming. 

"Because obviously, the drought isn't over. But more than that, it's time to stop using that word to describe our current climate pattern. 'Drought' implies a temporary situation. This is the way things are and will be. Bursts of precipitation followed by months of dry weather is the new normal. And the sooner we start accepting that reality, the better."

This is a pretty grim state of affairs. Climate change brings bigger extremes. The bursts of rain and snow that do come to California will probably intensify. The California minor flooding we saw in December might well become rare but real epic floods that inundate most of Sacramento. The several feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada might, in an isolated year here or there, would turn into dozens of feet, stranding people so much more than the December, 2021 episodes did.

Then, just as suddenly, California returns to its new mostly permanent drought. 

This January shows us how fast things turn around out there in this new regime.

In the winters that used to be, storms pretty reliably came off the Pacific Ocean from late November into March. The Sierra Nevada snowstorms more often than not were a near constant from Christmas to after Valentine's Day. 

No more.  It's (brief) feast or (long) famine. 

It's back to famine.  After Sacramento had that uber-wet day in December, January just gave them 0.05 inches of rain, compared to a normal of 3.66 inches.  Sierra mountain snow pack was 160 percent of normal in late December, which is why everybody thought this California wet season would be OK. 

Now, as of early this month, it was down to 92 percent of average for the date. That's not horrible, but it hasn't rained so far in February either and the winter precipitation train for California shows little sign of restarting. The rainy season in California usually winds down in mid-March. They're running out of time to build up a snowpack. 

California also had a few spells of warm weather in January which actually melted a little bit of that snow that piled up in the Sierra Nevada during December.  It's unusually warm in California this week, too. So warm that a rare winter excessive heat watch is in effect for later this week in the Los Angeles basin. 

February has been worse, with record high temperatures over the past several days melting more of the high elevation snow and hastening evaporation in lower elevations.  San Francisco reached 78 degrees on Thursday, the warmest temperature on record for the entire month of February.

Parts of the Los Angeles basin have been near 90 degrees pretty much all this week.  Brush and wildfires, once rare in February, are breaking out frequently in California this month. 

The Sierra Nevada snowpack would always melt away gradually in the late spring and through the summer, replenishing the state's reservoirs. Now, it's dribbling away in February. 

This is an example of how spring melt has turned more dramatic and early. Last year's melt was three or four weeks ahead of scheduled due to scorching spring temperatures. This continued an early trend scientists have been noticing in the region during the past decade or two.

We don't know how warm this coming spring will be in California. But the faltering wet season the state is now experiencing makes the stakes that much higher.