It is hard to envision how our largest state previously devastated by long term drought impacts has switched, in such short order, to massively excessive rain and snowfall during this winter season. By now, you’ve all read about or seen footage of the sodden atmospheric rivers often augmented by powerful Pacific storms pounding the state. Atmospheric rivers were first researched in the early 1990s in an MIT paper. I wrote on this topic last month.
Round one came earlier in the winter, and the second round developed in late February and has continued now into mid-March.
Global insurance broker Gallagher Re issued its annual report for 2022 in January on weather catastrophes. They cataloged 42 billion-dollar disasters with total costs of $360 billion, and only 39% of those losses were insured.
The most recent storm contained more warm air, carrying flooding rains and raising the snow level in the mountains up to 8000 feet. The torrential rain would have produced flash flooding by itself, but when it fell into the enormous snowpack between 4000 and 8000 foot elevations, the snowpack released additional destructive meltwaters, adding to the devastation, with more to come in central and Northern California in the next few days.
The flip side to these storms and…
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