All of Southern California is at risk of devastating flooding. Remember, due to the climate emergency; the atmosphere holds more water than it used to. I assume we will see videos out of California soon. Be sure to recommend the diaries the West Coast Kossacks will post.
Speaking of which, Meteor Blades will post his excellent reporting in Earth Matters, and Spotlight on Climate and Eco-Diaries at 11 am Pacific Time. Don’t miss them.
Like other climate-related disasters, the media rarely covers damage that started before the US border, and when the calamity moves north to Canada, the crisis stops there. Journalists don’t realize we are in a planetary crisis, not just an east coast problem. So at this point, there is no reporting that I can find specifically on Baja.
Southern California and the broader Southwest are typically impacted by the remnants of tropical systems from the eastern Pacific, Connolly says. Just last year, the remnants of Hurricane Kay caused heavy rains, with resulting flooding and mudflows, in California. But this will be a particularly strong event, Connolly adds.
California rarely sees direct hits from tropical cyclones (the broad term for tropical storms and hurricanes) because prevailing atmospheric currents send any storms that form in the subtropics to the west and northwest. In the case of the eastern Pacific Ocean, this atmospheric setup takes them away from the continental U.S. The relatively cold waters off the West Coast also typically cause any storms that do head toward land to weaken before they can make landfall. A hurricane struck San Diego, Calif., in October 1858, however, and caused considerable damage.
In the case of Hilary, a strong area of high pressure stuck over the central part of the U.S.—which will usher in a heat wave in those areas—and a low-pressure area to the west of California are forcing Hilary more northward, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, during one of his regular “virtual climate and weather office hours,” hosted on YouTube. If you have a strong storm moving quickly along such a path, it may not fall apart as soon as it normally would, setting up the rare possibility of a tropical cyclone hitting the state, he added.
When an El Niño is in place, as it is now, the climate pattern can ramp up hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific because it shifts atmospheric circulation patterns in ways that reduce the crosscutting winds that can hamper storm formation and strengthening over the area. (El Niño typically has the opposite effect in the Atlantic Ocean, where it usually increases these winds, tamping down hurricane activity. But this year exceptionally warm ocean waters are expected to override that influence, with NHC forecasting above-average hurricane activity there.)
The Heat Dome
The good news in the Atlantic.