California expects to be drenched by an ongoing storm that began shortly after Christmas and will last roughly 12 days before it is done, bringing nearly a foot of rain to the San Francisco Bay Area amid a severe drought.
While parts of the state, especially Southern California, enjoyed summerlike temperatures over the holiday weekend, much-needed rain has now arrived and its falling across the Golden State, from north to south.
As Breitbart News has noted, California has endured relatively dry winters for the past two years after rainy years from 2017 through 2019. Those rainy years came after five previous years of extreme statewide drought.
The La Niña conditions that produced the last two dry winters were predicted to continue through the winter of 2022-2023. However, rains earlier in the season, and the ongoing storm, could happily upend those forecasts.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
[Brian] Garcia, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said the coastal region is likely to see an accumulation of 8 to 12 inches over the next 12 days.
…
Garcia, the weather service meteorologist, said the rain was likely to taper off Tuesday evening and there’ll be a “break on Wednesday and another around New Years Day.”
It’s a lot of rain, he said. “But that’s the thing about California. We get the extremes.”
The Times speculated about climate change as a factor, and noted the risk of landslides after recent wildfires.
California’s large agricultural economy and dense urban communities depend on rainfall to fill reservoirs and recharge depleted aquifers. The state has failed to build significant new storage capacity in the last 40 years.
Therefore, ample winter rains are the only guarantee of prosperity — and, indeed, survival — in this dry region.
With heavy winter rainfall, there are indeed hazards — such as landslides and slick roads — but also hope for a blossoming spring and a summer without water restrictions, such as those already browning lawns in L.A.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.