Last updated October 15, 2021
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California Floods February 2019

United States

On February 13 and 14, 2019, an atmospheric river storm dumped extremely heavy rainfall and snowfall across California. Parts of the state saw record rainfall, flooding and mudslides, and at least two deaths were reported.

The fingerprint of global warming has been found in the long-term trend of increasingly heavy atmospheric rivers landing on the west coast of North America.[2] More generally, climate change is driving an increase in heavy precipitation across all storm types.  In California warming temperatures compound the threat of flooding, by converting snowfall into rainfall that melts snow pack and drives runoff.

Infrastructure is designed to withstand the extreme weather seen in the historical record. As extreme weather becomes more severe than weather of the past, thresholds can be crossed and infrastructure is threatened with collapse. The Oroville Dam spillway overflow in February 2017 is a good example of this pattern. An attribution study on the incident found that runoff in the watershed supplying the dam during the peak precipitation immediately prior to the damn failure was one-third greater than it otherwise would have been were it not for global warming.[1]

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Satellite Imagery
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Global Warming
Air Mass Temperature Increase
Large Scale Global Circulation Change
Atmospheric Moisture Increase
Atmospheric River Change
Extreme Precipitation Increase
California Floods February 2019