A big storm can be good for the state of California but will the citizens be safe? There is confirmed evidence suggesting that California could see an El Niño event worse than 1997, which caused massive flooding across Northern California. Activated on Tuesday, stunning images from Japan’s Himawari 8 Weather Satellite reveal the expectation of a historic El Niño in full bloom.
Monica Woods, Chief Meteorologist, News10-KXTV, believes that almost all models are showing consistency of stronger and stronger tendency for that to hold in place through the winter season. She adds that this one could rival that of 1997.
In most recent times, cyclones and typhoons, including one mammoth storm heading toward China with cloud cover the size of Texas, lead to shift the trade winds from west to east, pushing warm sub-surface water toward the coast of South America. This made it almost evident an El Niño event will last at least through the fall.
Woods shares that they hope just enough water to come in slow enough for the watersheds to hold this event. She adds that the positive thing is that so many of them are dry that they hold the capacity. However, the obvious drawback is, in a desert climate the terrain is just parched and so a lot of that can be runoff if those storms are too warm.
Climatologists believe that it is almost confirmed that the models will hold up in this El Niño year, and it might soon be the start of ending California’s historic drought, even if it may come at a price. Woods says that El Niño is great, and it could provide with some relief, and refill some of these reservoirs. But, a downfall of it is that it might be a catastrophic flooding.
El Niño refers to the variations in temperature and air pressure in the tropical Pacific Ocean that affect worldwide weather patterns. Pacific’s warmest water shifts eastward, changing location of strongest tropical thunderstorms to central Pacific. The thunderstorm shift changes jet-stream wind patterns. This leads to a warmer winter. Strong El Niños bring powerful winter storms and mudslides to the West. This causes a wetter average winter in the South.
