{"id":927483,"date":"2026-07-11T09:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T09:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/927483\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T09:06:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T09:06:22","slug":"hurricanes-landslides-are-becoming-much-likelier-to-hit-california-researchers-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/927483\/","title":{"rendered":"Hurricanes, landslides are becoming much likelier to hit California, researchers say"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rain<\/a>Dark clouds from tropical storm Hilary loom over the San Diego skyline in 2023. (File photo by Chris Stone\/Times of San Diego)<\/p>\n

Major storms like Hilary, which threatened San Diego three years ago, eventually will be much more likely to hit Southern California than they are now, a new paper has concluded.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The research from Stanford climate experts indicates that some major weather events affecting the region will be at least twice as likely by the end of the century.<\/p>\n

Yuan Wang<\/a>, an assistant professor at the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, studies the relationship between atmosphere and climate change. He says August 2023\u2019s storm Hilary, a rare Pacific-fed hurricane<\/a> that became a less destructive tropical storm before making landfall in Baja California<\/a> and reaching San Diego, was a \u201chundred-year event\u201d throughout recorded history.<\/p>\n

Now, he says, it\u2019s more of a \u201cfifty-year event.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the current climate a Hilary-type of storm that produces huge amounts of precipitation during the summer will only occur once every 110 years,\u201d Wang said. \u201cIt\u2019s so rare that many people could not even recall the last time a hurricane made landfall in Southern California.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to our calculation, the return period of the Hilary type of precipitation will reduce to 50 years by the end of this century, mainly due to the greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

That, he added, \u201cis pretty dramatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s research was done using newer techniques to predict the precipitation of storms in the Pacific Ocean, such as one developed by co-author Kerry Emanuel called dynamic downscaling<\/a>. This method winnows large-scale atmospheric information<\/a> into smaller datasets that use synthetic hurricane tracks to take into consideration interactions between a storm and its immediate environment. <\/p>\n

The method enables more accurate predictions than its predecessor, statistical downscaling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing could be very complicated \u2013 think about the timing of this hurricane precipitation in late summer, when we normally are pretty dry and may even experience wildfire threats,\u201d Wang said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The conclusions of the paper regarding tropical cyclone precipitation and associated landslides may raise eyebrows, but they also raise significant policy concerns for San Diego County and beyond. The region, however, is better prepared than it was even a handful of years ago, said Tom Corringham, a research economist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego\u2019s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to be investing more in implementation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not so much what needs to be done \u2014 it\u2019s how we\u2019re going to get there at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corringham\u2019s area of expertise lies in the economics of extreme weather as it relates to climate change, such as how much funding regions lose to \u201chundred-year events.\u201d He said that the most important thing that the world can do is reduce or end reliance on fossil fuels such as oil and gas.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut even if we reach net zero today, we have to deal with the consequences,\u201d he added. \u201cSo my focus is on climate change and protecting the most vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n

While cities within the county, and the county itself, have developed their own action plans, there are unique challenges at this corner of the country that may not exist elsewhere, Corringham pointed out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are a border city \u2014 we are a border region,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the Kumeyaay tribal nations as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

No group is exempt from severe weather events, he added. Even those southern Californians who somehow live untouched by \u2014 for example \u2014 fires or floods are still affected by them. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have a climate-related disaster it really does affect all of us, whether it\u2019s through tax-funded emergency relief, whether it\u2019s through higher insurance premiums, it affects us all \u2026 so by protecting those who are at greatest risk this can reduce the cost for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that while the central premise of the paper predicting the increased frequency of tropical cyclones is interesting, the reality is that climate change is so unpredictable that putting safeguards in place before disasters of this magnitude begin to appear will end up saving regions money \u2014 and in the not-so-very long term.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who are facing the greatest impacts did the least to create the problem,\u201d Corringham said. \u201cThere\u2019s a strong equity and justice component to climate action which I think is taken seriously at the global level and locally \u2026 It\u2019s typically the case that those with the least resources are the least resilient to the impacts of the changing climate, and for that reason we need to enact policies that will protect the most vulnerable among us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately these policies will be the ones that are most effective at reducing the costs to our communities,\u201d both economically and equitably, he said.<\/p>\n

This is an idea that the state of California does appear to be beginning to putting effort into implementing. ReCoverCA<\/a>, a new statewide program intended to help homeowners rebuild<\/a> after natural disasters, helps eligible residents repair or rebuild homes damaged by severe storms that struck the state from February through July of 2023 and January 2024.<\/p>\n

The program is specifically offering assistance to residents of San Diego affected by severe weather on Jan. 22, 2026, which caused flooding in areas around the Southcrest and Mountain View communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a program that always builds back better \u2014 we don\u2019t just\u00a0 build back to what was there before the disasters,\u201d said Maziar Movassaghi, assistant deputy director for Disaster Recovery at the California Department of Housing & Community Development<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201c(We want to) make communities more resilient. That\u2019s why we really encourage folks to apply.\u201d <\/p>\n

The state will be at the Malcolm X Branch Library<\/a> throughout the month of July to offer ongoing support for San Diegans wishing to apply to the program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dark clouds from tropical storm Hilary loom over the San Diego skyline in 2023. (File photo by Chris…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":469480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,285,8580,23754,8773,374126,3549,7264,63443,41364,72988,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-927483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-america","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-flooding","tag-natural-disasters","tag-rainfall","tag-recoverca","tag-san-diego","tag-sandiego","tag-stanford","tag-tropical-cyclones","tag-ucsd","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116900554202705268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}