Evacuations are underway once again in central California as yet another atmospheric river is poised to hit the state, bringing another round of snow and rain to an area that has already suffered from significant flooding this year.
Officials have ordered residents of Alpaugh and Allensworth (located about an hour north of Bakersfield, roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles) to evacuate, amid fears the roads could become impassable.
The storm is expected to be less intense than past atmospheric rivers, bringing one to three inches of rain along the lower elevations and two to four inches in the foothills, but will also bring wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour. Forecasters say the rains will hit the San Diego area late Tuesday morning before moving inland. And the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and San Bernardino Mountains are expecting up to four additional feet of snow by Wednesday afternoon.
Atmospheric rivers, a meteorological term that few were familiar with before this string of storms, are bands of moisture that act like a fire hose when they hit land, dumping rain and snow for thousands of miles. The parade of storms in 2023 have helped cut the drought in California, but have resulted in widespread flooding and heavy snow throughout the state (which could result in more flooding as spring thawing begins).
The continuous line of storms caused some meteorologists to lose their cool this past winter. In January, for example, the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office issued a frank and dire warning, saying that “this will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while… This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at and needs to be taken seriously.”
Since the beginning of the year, some areas of the state have received nearly 40 inches of rain. Downtown Los Angeles has seen over 25 inches. And in San Diego County, more rain has fallen in the past two and a half months than in all of 2022.