SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The hazardous weather bearing down on Northern California has flooded overwhelmed rivers and creeks, toppled trees and knocked out power to a storm-weary region.
It also could be a short-term drought buster.
Following a wet and windy weekend, the region is facing yet another wave of extreme storms. Heavy rain and wind are forecast at least through Tuesday, with showers, Sierra snow and flooding concerns persisting throughout the week.
“The conga-line of atmospheric rivers along the Pacific jet stream is likely to continue for the next week or two,” John Abatzoglou, a climate and weather expert at the University of California, Merced.
The state’s water supply is looking better than it has in quite some time. California’s reservoirs are filling up, with some of the smaller lakes such as Folsom, Camanche and New Bullards Bar sitting above their average for this time of year. The Sierra snowpack is as deep as it’s been in decades for a January measurement, a promising sign for a resource that supplies roughly one-third of the state’s water.
The rosy outlook has come at a considerable price. At least six people have died in California over the past 10 days as a result of the wind and rain. Towering trees have fallen onto houses and across roadways, and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses have lost power.
After a considerably dry two years, 2023 is off to a stormy start. Those extremes, climate experts say, are the California way.
“California droughts are severe enough that it takes a flood to get out of them,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
Climatologists and state and local water officials are cautiously optimistic that the recent storms will provide a one-year reprieve from the dry conditions. No part of the state is in an “exceptional drought” stage, according to federal drought monitors, and the portion of the state’s population living in areas of severe and extreme drought has fallen dramatically since September.
Abatzoglou said “drought abatement is underway” during this wet stretch and “the continuation of very wet conditions will continue to help us dig out of the three-year drought here in California.”
“Should we have continued reservoir refill and healthy snowpack numbers come spring, we should be looking at adequate surface water supplies for this summer and drought relief for many sectors,” he said.
Surface water — typically any water above ground such as streams, reservoirs and some springs and wells — is vital for irrigation and public water supply. But surface water supplies can also be temporary and one good year doesn’t mean the state’s long-term drought is over.
“We’ve seen some really wet years in the past decade and have still seen the existence of really long droughts,” Swain said.
Summers are becoming hotter and drier, Swain said, and the “atmospheric thirstiness” those conditions cause have erased gains made in wet winters. The Sierra snowpack was at one of its deepest measurements on record in January 2022, only to be followed by the driest stretch on record in the state’s history.
That means that local water districts, many of whom adopted water restrictions and calls for drastic usage cuts in recent years, are unlikely to reverse those measures just yet.
“Whenever this sequence (of storms) ends, we probably won’t have short-term drought conditions in Northern California,” Swain said. “The long-term drought may or may not be alleviated by all of this.”
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