A summary from the near future. This is how many characterize the destructive storms and deadly floods that have been sweeping California for two weeks, which is also one of the driest states on the west coast of the USA.
Key points
Since the end of December, it has rained so much that rivers swelled, flooding settlements, roads and homes, killing at least 18 people and forcing tens of thousands of Californians to flee their homes.
Along with the torrential rain came gale-force winds, which have uprooted centuries-old trees from the months-parched land, which can no longer absorb the huge volume of water.
This nightmarish scene is attributed to the so-called “atmospheric rivers”.
These are essentially columns of water vapor that are trapped in warm air masses due to high temperatures and cross the atmosphere starting from tropical regions.
When they arrive in this case over the Pacific, next to California, they can contain as much water as the Mississippi.
It is only natural that when this moisture becomes rain it brings a deluge.
Relatively recent, recorded only in the last few decades, the extreme weather phenomenon – and especially its intensity, scope and frequency – is considered to be directly linked to worsening climate change.
California has already been hit by five “atmospheric rivers” since late December, and three more are expected in the next two weeks.
They could deposit up to 75 trillion liters of water – enough to cover the entire state, with the level reaching half a meter.
“No harm”?
When it emerges from this nightmare, California could in a sense see the… “glass half full” from this disaster.
After so much rain and flooding, the expectation would logically be the end of the prolonged drought, which has dried up reservoirs and parched the land, largely destroying the landscape and agricultural production.
But the scientific community of climatologists, hydrologists and meteorologists in California is now divided.
Many consider it almost improbable that a month or so of storms would be enough to “erase” the three years of drought that have now been measured.
Water levels in the state’s major reservoirs continue to be below average for this season.
In the Colorado River, which feeds California and six other western states, it is even lower.
64% of the state’s groundwater is also below normal levels.
The latest official data, released last Thursday, showed that all of California remained in unusually dry conditions .
However, the total area in severe or extreme drought conditions fell from 71% to 46% in just one week.
The state climatologist, Michael Anderson, however, keeps a “small basket”.
It is still too early to predict how the rest of the wet season, which lasts in the state until April, will play out, he points out.
Last year turned out to be the driest on record. For groundwater to return to normal levels, warns Anderson, it is estimated that several years of above-average rainfall will be needed…
“It’s a warning sign for the climate,” Carla Nemeth, director of the state’s Water Resources Agency, said at a press conference.
“California is experiencing both a drought emergency and a flood emergency.”
Too little, too late?
“If you pour a gallon of water over a straw, only a certain amount of water can go through it,” University of Montana hydrologist Zachary Heilman succinctly described the situation.
Climatologist Noah Diefenbaugh of Stanford University did it even more… minutely. “If someone doesn’t get paid for months and then gets a regular paycheck, that’s not going to make up the shortfall in their bank balance”…
For now, affected areas in California have been declared a state of emergency, and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested a $202 million increase in flood prevention funding in the state’s 2023 budget.
A further 738 have meanwhile been invested in flood protection projects over the past two years.
But the damages from the ongoing disaster are already estimated at 1 billion dollars. And from spring the nightmare of water shortage will begin again.
For many, this is a vicious circle.
In 2014, the state spent $2.7 billion on water storage projects, on top of the 1,500 reservoirs it already has.
So far, not everything has been completed.
“But even if every proposed reservoir in that program were built, it would only increase water storage by 10% and water supply by 1%,” argues Jay Lund, a professor in the university’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. of California Davis.
He identifies the management of the state’s groundwater as a major problem, with 80% of use in agriculture.
“In some places the aquifers have dropped hundreds of feet,” he said, and making up for that deficit can’t be done even with weeks of heavy rain.
Changing the “map”
According to Lund, as well as other analysts, the long-term solution to the problem includes the permanent fallow of irrigated land, which nevertheless depends on the cultivation of millions of households and feeds much of the US.
Agriculture is also – along with the entertainment industry of Hollywood and the “Mecca of technology”, Silicon Valley – one of the main drivers of the economy in California, whose GDP is about 3.6 trillion dollars, the largest in country.
It is even estimated that for 2022, thanks to its size, it could in fact even displace Germany from the position of the fourth largest economy on the planet (the USA, China and Japan are leading at the national level).
For the part of the population that relies on agricultural production, however, the incomplete response and consequences of climate change could mean a further explosion of social and economic inequalities.
And especially in a state like California, in whose territory live 186 billionaires and 30% of the total number of American homeless people, in a phenomenon that is now taking on the dimensions of a humanitarian crisis.
