Nov 30, 2012 - scientificamerican.com

Huge flows of vapor in the atmosphere, dubbed "atmospheric rivers," have unleashed massive floods every 200 years, and climate change could bring more of them

By Michael D. Dettinger and B. Lynn Ingram

DROWNED: A 43-day atmospheric-river storm in 1861 turned California’s Central Valley region into an inland sea, simulated here on a current-day map.
Image: Don Foley

Editor's note (11/30/12): The article will appear in the January 2013 issue of Scientific American. We are making it freely available now because of the flooding underway in California.

The intense rainstorms sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days. The deluges quickly transformed rivers running down from the Sierra Nevada mountains along the state’s eastern border into raging torrents that swept away entire communities and mining settlements. The rivers and rains poured into the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, and one quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned. Downtown Sacramento was submerged under 10 feet of brown water filled with debris from countless mudslides on the region’s steep slopes. California’s legislature, unable to function, moved to San Francisco until Sacramento dried out—six months later. By then, the state was bankrupt.

A comparable episode today would be incredibly more devastating. The Central Valley is home to more than six million people, 1.4 million of them in Sacramento. The land produces about $20 billion in crops annually, including 70 percent of the world’s almonds—and portions of it have dropped 30 feet in elevation because of extensive groundwater pumping, making those areas even more prone to flooding. Scientists who recently modeled a similarly relentless storm that lasted only 23 days concluded that this smaller visitation would cause $400 billion in property damage and agricultural losses. Thousands of people could die unless preparations and evacuations worked very well indeed.

Was the 1861–62 flood a freak event? It appears not. New studies of sediment deposits in widespread locations indicate that cataclysmic floods of this magnitude have inundated California every two centuries or so for at least the past two millennia. The 1861–62 storms also pummeled the coastline from northern Mexico and southern California up to British Columbia, creating the worst floods in recorded history. Climate scientists now hypothesize that these floods, and others like them in several regions of the world, were caused by atmospheric rivers, a phenomenon you may have never heard of. And they think California, at least, is overdue for another one.

Ten Mississippi Rivers, One Mile High

Atmospheric rivers are long streams of water vapor that form at about one mile up in the atmosphere. They are only 250 miles across but extend for thousands of miles—sometimes across an entire ocean basin such as the Pacific. These conveyor belts of vapor carry as much water as 10 to 15 Mississippi Rivers from the tropics and across the middle latitudes. When one reaches the U.S. West Coast and hits inland mountain ranges, such as the Sierra Nevada, it is forced up, cools off and condenses into vast quantities of precipitation.

People on the West Coast of North America have long known about storms called “pineapple expresses,” which pour in from the tropics near Hawaii and dump heavy rain and snow for three to five days. It turns out that they are just one configuration of an atmospheric river. As many as nine atmospheric rivers hit California every year, according to recent investigations. Few of them end up being strong enough to yield true megafloods, but even the “normal” storms are about as intense as rainstorms get in the rest of the U.S., so they challenge emergency personnel as well as flood-control authorities and water managers.

Atmospheric rivers also bring rains to the west coasts of other continents and can occasionally form in unlikely places. For example, the catastrophic flooding in and around Nashville in May 2010—which caused some 30 deaths and more than $2 billion in damages—was fed by an unusual atmospheric river that brought heavy rain for two relentless days up into Tennessee from the Gulf of Mexico. In 2009 substantial flooding in southern England and in various parts of Spain was also caused by atmospheric rivers. But the phenomenon is best understood along the Pacific Coast, and the latest studies suggest that these rivers of vapor may become even larger in the future as the climate warms.

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