The Latest Breaking News from Drought

Global prices for food commodities like grain and vegetable oils were the highest on record last year even after falling for nine months in a row

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles River roared to life this week as a series of powerful storms moved through the Southland. In Long Beach, 3 feet of water shut down the 710 Freeway in both directions, while flooding in the San Fernando Valley forced the closure of the Sepulveda…

California has seen so much rain over the past few weeks that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. Yet, most of the state remains in severe drought.

The storms keep coming, one after another after another, like a series of fire-hose blasts so relentless that meteorologists use terms like “atmospheric river,” “bomb cyclone” and “bombogenesis.” What happened to our formerly gentle old winter visitor, the “pineapple express”? Cities and highways have flooded in Northern California, and the…

California has seen so much rain in the last few weeks that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. At the same time, most of the state is still in severe drought.

African elephant numbers have dropped from about 26 million in the 1800s to 415,000 today. While this is largely due to European colonisation, poaching and habitat loss, these majestic animals now face another grave challenge.

LOS ANGELES — The pounding rains of New Year’s Eve had ceased, but the pastures, freeways and neighborhoods surrounding the tiny community of Wilton continued to disappear beneath a vast, growing ocean of muddy water that left only the roofs of sunken vehicles visible to rescue helicopters.

Heavy rainfall expected to cause flooding and power outages across the state, with tornados in other parts of the US.

LOS ANGELES — A successive series of powerful atmospheric river storms poses a growing threat to California as the ground becomes more saturated, river levels rise and heavy winds threaten the power infrastructure.

The Bureau of Meteorology says there is a 40 per cent chance a warm and dry El Niño pattern will immediately follow the current La Niña should it recede in autumn, putting farmers on edge.

Amid a brief pause in the onslaught of winter storms slamming into California, state water officials trudged through fresh snow at Echo Summit, south of Lake Tahoe, on Tuesday to confirm what more than a hundred sensors across the Sierra already show: the California Sierra snowpack is at a decade…