When Will We Have The Next #HellaStorm? New Fleet Of Planes Predicting Massive Weather Systems
(CBS SF) -- California is crawling into its fourth year of drought, but a new program says it could end if enough storms like last December's sweep across the Pacific this winter.
Atmospheric rivers, also known as AR's, are powerful storms that pull moisture from the tropics and deliver it the the West. They're also vital to our water supply and research shows they've ended 40 percent of California droughts since 1950. AR's include our famous local rainmaker, the Pineapple Express. However, they are also some of the most difficult weather events to predict with useful accuracy.
A new field campaign called CalWater 2015 hopes to shed more light on how AR's work.
The interagency, interdisciplinary project involves four research planes flying through major storms while a ship outfitted with additional instruments cruises below.
Marty Ralph, a climate researcher for Scripps Institution of Oceanography says we have very few observations of how strong atmospheric rivers are off shore. Satellites give us a general picture, but don't reveal how much about water vapor content. The program's barely a week old and researchers are already getting good information.
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"The storms that we've sampled in the last couple of days off over the eastern Pacific with a NOAA G4 aircraft, we found the AR's transported something like 15 times the liquid water content of the Mississippi River discharge," Ralph said. That could deliver up to half of the state's annual precipitation between December and February.
Researchers are hoping to learn more about the strength and orientation of these systems which will help us better prepare for both droughts and floods.
"Small uncertainties in the forecast of AR conditions can yield significant uncertainties in the precipitation and therefore runoff," Ralph said, who along with his colleagues will continue gathering data for the next month.
