Like rail freight cars slowly moving down a track at increasing speed, California is about to suffer a “storm train” this week that may increase rainfall by over 400 percent over last year.
The El Niño phenomenon is expected to double the average annual rainfall along the California Coast and increase precipitation by 25 to 50 percent farther inland. Given that California’s four-year drought cut rainfall in half, this year’s total rain could more than quadruple last year’s total of 6.29 inches to up to 30 inches in Los Angeles.
AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Matt Rinde reported on January 3, “The pattern in the West will remain quite active through the coming week.” While a series of El Niño storms battered the Northwestern United States during November, slaughtered 43 people in the Southeast and Texas in December; El Niño appears ready to target California over the next few months.
An initial storm system will move through the state from late Sunday and early Monday until Tuesday morning. This weak storm is expected to bring only a few inches of rainfall. But several much bigger storms will roll ashore from Tuesday evening through Friday. These monsters could bring heavy rain, flooding and 1-3 feet of snow in the mountain regions.
Breitbart News reported in October that the NOAA Climate Prediction Center stated that the planet was already experiencing the most extreme El Niño conditions ever recorded. With super-heated sections of the equatorial Pacific Ocean surface heating up by a stunning 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the agency predicts this El Niño will continue through winter and gradually weaken through late spring.
The prior El Niño record for super-heated sections of the equatorial Pacific Ocean was 8 degrees Fahrenheit in 1997-98. During a 5-week storm train during that period, 35 Californians died due to mudslides, floods, high winds and lightning strikes. President Clinton declared two-thirds of California counties a national disaster.
El Niño’s year-long warming trend along the eastern half of the equatorial Pacific has reversed the “Westerlies” trade winds that blow from South America to Polynesia, turn up toward Japan, and then curl along Alaska and the West Coast.
As a result, America’s weather pattern has flipped, with New Yorkers on Christmas Day wearing shorts and heading to the beach in 72-degree weather; while Los Angeles surfers were headed out to the mall in 59-degree weather to buy sweaters.
Breitbart News warned in September that El Niño was also causing a severe drought across Central America and the Caribbean. By September, roughly half of the corn and a significant amount of the bean harvests had been destroyed.
Prices of basic food staples in the area had risen by 40 percent and hundreds of thousands of families across the region were increasingly without access to basic food necessities. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 1 million people in Guatemala do not have sufficient food. With El Niño strengthening, the drought is creating an even bigger humanitarian disaster.
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