California’s wild weather swings, from pounding rain to drought and from fires to floods, are widely expected to worsen as the climate warms. A new study shows just how severe things might get, and it’s not pretty.
The biggest of Pacific storms will dump 40% more rain and snow on parts of the Sierra, boost the hourly rate of precipitation in hills and valleys nearly a third, on average, and be about 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer upon landfall, the research shows.The findings, distilled from models of the weather phenomena known as atmospheric rivers, mean that a worst-case storm scenario, on par with the Great Flood of 1862 that turned the Central Valley into a raging sea and took countless lives, is an increasingly real possibility.