Despite desperate pleas from California Gov. Gavin Newsom about the dangers of extreme weather, and weeks of advance warnings from meteorologists, the relentless series of storms drenching California has already claimed more lives than the death toll from the past two years of wildfires.
So how do people still get caught in the crosshairs of megastorms that have proven their ability to flood cars, ravage homes and claim lives? Have Californians — once roundly ridiculed as weather wimps — already become jaded to atmospheric rivers and overconfident that they can handle the hazards?
Meteorologists only really started digging into complicated questions about weather psychology like these around 20 years ago, according to Rebecca Morss, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
