How California’s weather catastrophe turned into a miracle

Gushing waterfalls, swollen lakes and snow-covered mountaintops transformed the state’s arid landscapes.

By Scott Dance

July 22, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Lake Oroville released water to the Feather River in Oroville, Calif. on March 17 after a historic winter of precipitation. (Video: California DWR)

FRESNO, Calif. — Californians were preparing for another year of unrelenting drought in 2023. Instead, they got months of incessant rain and some of the heaviest snowfall they have ever seen.

They feared blasts of spring warmth would quickly turn snow into floods, adding to the havoc from a series of winter storms. But, until recently, temperatures remained mercifully cool, allowing for a slow and steady melt.

The result: A return of water to California that has erased drought maps, poured into long-dry irrigation systems and raised expectations that, after months with water bursting from their gates, reservoirs will end the summer melt filled to capacity.

It has been a stark transformation, with arid landscapes and trickling rivers replaced with swollen lakes, gushing waterfalls and snow-covered mountaintops. Instead of pumping groundwater to keep crops alive, farmers have access to brimming canals carrying more water than they could use.

(Video: Josh Edelson/Getty Images)

The same Californians thanking the heavens for their good weather fortune are still wary, to be sure. A series of moisture-laden storms known as atmospheric rivers brought Central Valley flooding, coastal landslides and mountain blizzards — a change from years of drought and wildfires, but hazards all the same. Scientists say shifts in the Golden State’s climate could mean more dry years, interspersed with extremely wet ones like 2023.

Meanwhile, there are reminders around the globe of the sort of extreme weather California has largely dodged in recent months: Persistent record-setting heat across the southern United States, Europe and Asia; an unprecedently massive swarm of wildfires in Canada; damaging flash floods from Vermont to India to South Korea.

Californians know good weather fortune can only last so long, what with a newly accelerating El Niño climate pattern that they know threatens more extreme flooding and landslides.

The coursing rivers and flush irrigation canals nonetheless give Sarah Woolf a sense of relief. The water consultant who works with farms like her family’s in Madera County, north of Fresno, said California needs to take maximum advantage of the precipitation when it hits.

After all, she said it’s better to have too much water than not enough: “With water, you have more options.”

Snowpack at astounding depths

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