by As California prepares for another atmospheric storm on Sunday, Tulare Lake continues to remind visitors of the powerful effects these extreme storms can have.
The lake’s flood waters, formed after about a dozen atmospheric river storms hit California in 2023, are still stretching over thousands of acres of prime farmland more than nine months after the resurrection of the “ghost lake,” as some people called it.
This summer, the stagnant waters of the lake became a hot spot for wild birds and caused an outbreak of avian botanism that forced wildlife officers to patrol by airboat every day and collect hundreds of dead birds. Flooded vehicles and telecommunications equipment were submerged along the lake bed, and farm operators were unable to access their fields.
The lake’s continued presence in this corner of the Central Valley shows how the environmental impacts of last year’s extreme rainfall are still unfolding across California. This weekend’s storms could bring heavy precipitation to other parts of the state, but most of the flooding impacts are not expected to last as long.
Today, Tulare Lake is shrinking fast, even with the recent rains. As of Thursday, water covered about 4,532 acres of farmland, according to Justin Caporusso, who handles public relations for Kings County, where the flood waters settled. That means the lake is less than 1/20 of its peak size last year, and life is returning to normal for those living nearby.
Sgt. Nate Ferrier, of the King County Sheriff’s Department, who visited the lake in late January, said most of it has been cleaned up.
“The farming community was already back to life,” he said. “There were tractors everywhere.”
More than a century ago, the lake was a natural feature of the southern San Joaquin Valley before settlers dug irrigation ditches to reroute water and drain the landscape for farming. Last year, the floodwaters of the Tulare Basin filled up because reservoirs couldn’t handle intense snowmelt runoff from the Sierra Nevada after a series of storms.
This week’s atmospheric river storms — typified by a significant storm on Sunday — are unlikely to have much impact on Tulare Lake, Caporusso said in an email. Reservoirs upstream from the lake have the capacity to handle the precipitation, and the California Department of Water Resources found that the southern Sierra has about 45% as much snow as usual for this time of year.
But the storm is expected to have a widespread impact in other parts of the state, including near Los Angeles. An atmospheric river is expected to arrive on Sunday and last until Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service in Los Angeles. Along the central coast and its inland valleys, the weather service said they expected “a lot of rain” and “major hydrological problems.”
“People have to start preparing now,” the forecasters insisted.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said soils from San Francisco to San Diego are saturated, meaning heavy rains could quickly trigger flooding.
“We are expecting a very significant event that could cause widespread and potentially serious flooding in Southern California,” Swain said in a YouTube briefing.
Swain said a marine heat wave sitting off the coast of California likely helped boost thunderstorm activity this season in California and could be producing heavy rain during “local torrential downpours.” Swain said four communities – San Francisco, Ventura, Long Beach and San Diego – have experienced heavy rainfall that has led to urban flash flooding and is likely related to those warm ocean waters.
“I would expect this to happen again somewhere between San Francisco and San Diego because of this upcoming storm event,” Swain said. “If this happens somewhere, that’s where there’s likely to be immediate and potentially serious flooding.”
It will be the second atmospheric river in a week. Wednesday’s storm required several rescues and traffic was backed up.
Atmospheric rivers are plumes of moisture that travel hundreds of miles across the Pacific Ocean. The storms that hit California now are referred to as “Pineapple Expresses” because their moisture comes from waters near Hawaii.
Atmospheric rivers can be the main drivers of precipitation for the West Coast, and cause more than $1.1 billion in annual flood damage on average, according to research published in 2022 in the journal Scientific Reports. About 84% of the flood damage in the Western states is related to atmospheric rivers.
Scientists think that climate change is increasing the potential of these storms. A warmer atmosphere can absorb more water vapor, giving the storms the ability to deliver more extreme precipitation.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
