Total Precipitable Water Vapor on January 4, 2023.
The newest in a collection of atmospheric rivers drenching the state was accompanied by hazardous winds and left hundreds of individuals with out energy.
Just 4 days after heavy rain hit California, the state was drenched with one other atmospheric river on January Four and 5, 2023. A plume of moisture from the tropical Pacific interacted with a low-pressure system that quickly strengthened over the northeast Pacific, producing a storm that precipitated flooding, toppled timber, and downed energy strains.
According to the National Weather Service, coastal areas of California noticed wind speeds of 40 to 80 miles per hour. On the night of January 4, wind speeds exceeded 100 miles per hour close to Lake Tahoe. About 1 to three inches of rain fell on communities close to Santa Cruz and San Francisco on the night of January 4, however the storm continued to drop rain on the Bay Area because it moved east on January 5. Some areas south of Big Sur noticed 6 to eight inches of rain in 24 hours.
This map reveals the whole precipitable water vapor within the environment at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 4, 2023. Precipitable water vapor is the quantity of water in a column of the environment if all the water vapor have been condensed into liquid. Dark inexperienced areas on the map point out a slender band of moisture flowing from the tropical Pacific towards the West Coast, making this atmospheric river an instance of a “Pineapple Express.” The picture was derived from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System, Atmospheric Data Assimilation System (GEOS ADAS), which uses satellite data and models of physical processes to calculate what is happening in the atmosphere.
The series of atmospheric rivers drenching California in recent days could be seen as a welcome relief to the state’s persistent drought. Atmospheric rivers occur regularly in wintertime, and they account for up to 50 percent of all rain and snow that falls in the western United States. However, the rapid succession of atmospheric rivers leaves communities more susceptible to flooding and could cause landslides.
January 4, 2023
The image above was acquired on January 4, 2023, at 1:20 p.m. Pacific Standard Time by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20 satellite. It shows the storm as it was intensifying, which contributed to the high wind speeds. When air pressure in a mid-latitude cyclone rapidly drops and winds intensify, these storms can undergo a process meteorologists call bombogenesis. Storms with central pressures that fall an average of least 1 millibar per hour for 24 hours are sometimes called “bomb cyclones.”
Downed power lines contributed to leaving over 170,000 homes without electricity as of the morning of January 5, according to PowerOutage.us. Most of the outages were seen in coastal counties such as Mendocino, Sonoma, and San Mateo.
Atmospheric rivers are among the most damaging storm types in the middle latitudes, especially with regard to the hazardous wind they produce, according to research led by Duane Waliser at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Waliser and colleagues examined the most destructive windstorms of the last 20 years—the top 2 percent in terms of wind speeds near Earth’s surface—and found that atmospheric rivers were associated with up to half of these storms.
As Californians cleaned up from this latest storm system, the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center expected more atmospheric rivers to reach the state on January 7 and 9, 2023.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).
