California starts a fresh week with another huge Pacific storm poised to unleash torrents of rain across the state, bringing power outages, landslides, floods and even the chance of avalanches in the mountains.
(Bloomberg) — California starts a fresh week with another huge Pacific storm poised to unleash torrents of rain across the state, bringing power outages, landslides, floods and even the chance of avalanches in the mountains.
Heavy rain is already falling in many regions, and more than 120,000 people are without power mostly in northern and central California, according to PowerOutage.us. That’s down from more than 500,000 on Sunday after an earlier storm over the weekend.
The new storm may dump 2 to 5 inches (5 to 13 centimeters) of rain in some areas, and 1 to 4 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada, said Ashton Robinson Cook, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Center. Wind gusts may reach upwards of 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour in many places.
“There is quite a bit of rainfall across most of the state,” said Robinson Cook. And the storm is just getting started. “There will be another round of heavier precipitation tomorrow.”
Read More: California Faces Weeks of Rain, Thanks to System Stuck in Sky
The storm is another in a series of atmospheric river events, long streams of moisture that can stretch for thousands of miles across the Pacific and then deliver as much water as flows through the mouth of the Mississippi River when they’re wrung out on California’s mountains. The storms have already caused more than $1 billion in losses and damages, according to an estimate by AccuWeather Inc. Governor Gavin Newsom said violent weather has led to 12 deaths since late December.
Snow will fall by the foot in the Sierra Nevada, and a large area of the mountains could see a 1-in-50-year event, according to Enki Research.
With snow falling so fast, and large amounts already in the mountains, the risk of avalanches are rising Robinson Cook said.
In addition to the rain and wind, there’s also a marginal chance of severe thunderstorms along coastal areas south of San Francisco, potentially touching off even greater destructive wind gusts and short-lived tornadoes, according to the US Storm Prediction Center.
The system will continue to unfold through Tuesday, and another atmospheric river is expected to land Thursday and Friday. The pattern that’s sending storm after storm to the West Coast probably won’t start to break up until the middle of next week.
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