Rain fairly-heavy at times this early Friday on California’s north coast, though, sunshine is predicted for tomorrow.
Hurrah!
Yet to be short-lived — just sunny Saturday and Sunday, rain coming back in earnest by Tuesday. And as for Monday? Apparently, up for grabs weather-wise.
A heavy-rain season this year, one we were supposed to get 2015/16, but really didn’t, and we’re were forecast to be way-drier right now.
However, California’s in record wet…
(Illustration: ‘Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay,’ by F.H. Varley, found here).
Reportedly, the North Coast and inlands received between 6-inches and 3.5-inches of rain the last couple of days (not counting today), and even with the respite over the weekend, more wet weather is lined-up out in the Pacific. And in crazy waves, especially with those ‘atmospheric rivers‘ — via SFGate this morning:
“We normally get one or two atmospheric rivers in the winter,” said Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Monterey.
“This year they’ve been coming in back-to-back. We’ve had at least four.”
Anderson added: “We haven’t had any huge global steering mechanism such as an El Niño impacting the weather. It has just been up to Mother Nature to bring these storms. It’s unknown why so many and I’m sure that will be researched and debated in years to come.”
And this has been going for for months: ‘One of the most impressive gains of the season happened late last year, when NOAA found that Lake Tahoe added 8,690,131,707 gallons of fresh water between Dec. 9 and 11.’
A shitload of rain/snow in a short space…
And a ‘steering mechanism‘ referred above not really in play, but ‘Mother Nature‘ taking the lead? Nothing like a change in the climate’s weather.
Yesterday, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) announced our La Niña event is over, gone. Considered ‘weak‘ by most weather people anyway, La Niña usually brings more precipitation to the US Northwest and Canada, including parts of far-northern California — usually above the Crescent City area for the coast — but not normally to the central and southern parts of the state.
Those regions experience goodly rain this season.
Supposedly, some computer models call for another El Niño in 2017. In that regard, the CPC’s current consensus forecasts about a 48-percent chance of an El Niño this year.
Dr. Jeff Masters at WunderBlog yesterday afternoon explained our current ‘mechanism‘ situation:
As further evidence of the demise of La Niña, subsurface cold waters across the equatorial Pacific have completely vanished, and much warmer-than-average waters built off the coast of Peru in late January and early February, bringing unusual El Niño-like flooding rains to that nation.
The 2016-2017 La Niña event was one of the weakest and shorted-lived La Niñas on record, lasting just six months and peaking with sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Niño3.4 region of 0.8° below average.
And maybe throw into the mix, some ‘Mother Nature‘ under the influence of record heat — further from Dr. Masters:
The temperature at the northernmost land station in the world, Kap Morris Jesup, located on the northern coast of Greenland at 83.65°N latitude, soared to a remarkable 35°F (1.5°C) on Wednesday — beating the previous day’s high of -22°F by a shocking 57°, and marking a temperature more typical of June at this frigid location.
The mercury skyrocketed an astonishing 63°F (34.8°C) in just 24 hours, from -29°F at 15 UTC February 7 to 33°F at 15 UTC February 8.
…
The warm air in the Arctic this week continues a trend of record to near-record heat seen in the Arctic throughout the winter of 2016 – 2017.
The warm air has helped bring about the lowest arctic sea ice extent ever recorded during January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Rain and rain, and mechanisms coming apart at the seams…it seems.