California Needs a Lot of Superstorms to End Drought

While the latest weather should be good news for a state starved for water, experts say that one storm will just not offer enough rain relief.

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Weather officials expect a “storm of the decade” to wallop California Wednesday night with hurricane-force winds and torrential rainfall. While that should be good news for a state starved for water, experts have said that one storm will just not offer enough rain relief.

California has essentially lost "a winter season's worth of rain," due to its three-year drought, said Richard Seager, a climate scientist from Columbia University. The upcoming storm, the National Weather Service projects, will drop between 1 and 4 inches in urban areas and 5 to 8 inches in hilly regions. "It's been quite a while since we've seen something of this magnitude," said Austin Cross, a forecaster with the weather service, to the San Jose Mercury News. Forecasters like him are referring to the weather event as "the strongest storm so far this season and perhaps in several years."

Even with these storm predictions, weather officials say that the state still needs more rainfall, although they disagree on how much. The two central agencies which measure California’s drought recovery, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the California Department of Water Resources, use very different methods, according to the Los Angeles Times. NOAA, which calculates rainfall throughout the state, reports that over the course of the next six months, California needs about 18 to 21 more inches of rain in order to bust the drought in Northern and coastal Southern California. In other words more than double the amount of rain that the state has already received all year. Inland areas of Southern California need only 6 to 9 inches. Using the expected rainfall for urban areas, California would need about six to twelve "once in a decade storms."

 

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Daniel Luzer is GOVERNING's news editor.
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