California is lush and green for a second straight year. Thank El Niño.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/04/12/california-el-nino-wet-season-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com
by washingtonpost
California is lush and green for a second straight year. Thank El Niño.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/04/12/california-el-nino-wet-season-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com
by washingtonpost
1 comment
A late-season storm is swinging into California this weekend, bringing heavy rain, mountain snow and strong winds.
It’s the latest in a stormy season in which 51 atmospheric rivers — jets of moisture from the Pacific — struck the West Coast, fueled in part by the strong El Niño climate pattern.
While California did not see [the eye-popping rain and snow totals that it did last year](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/22/california-water-supply-lakes-reservoirs/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5), the storm door opened in January and has stayed open well into spring.
“This year had many weaker storms, but so many more of them that we are pretty much normal across the state,” said Chad Hecht, a research meteorologist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “It’s abnormal to be this normal — we tend to be either really wet or really dry.”
Still, taken together, this season marks two relatively wet and snowy years in a row for the state — California is lush and green this spring with full reservoirs and a substantial snowpack that has yet to melt.
Though [El Niño is rapidly weakening](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/08/la-nina-watch-el-nino-demise/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9), experts say this winter [bore the signs](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/how-much-did-el-nino-influence-precipitation-over-united-states-past) of the climate pattern, both in California and nationally.