Another powerful winter storm moved into Southern California on February 22, bringing snow, a lot of rain and blizzard conditions in some areas.
The National Weather Service forecasted a “cold and dangerous winter storm through Saturday evening” and advised people to be careful with possible roadway flooding, road closures, fallen trees and power lines and a possible severe snowstorm.
Earlier this year, Southern California received above-average rainfall for the month of October, bringing mudslides, sinkholes and flooding that led to the loss of many lives and damaged thousands of homes. Downtown Los Angeles received more than 13 inches of rain since October, nearly the annual average of about 14.25 inches.
Now, weather forecasters are expecting to see between 2 to 5 inches of rainwater through the weekend.
This unexpected amount of rain took people by surprise and raised concerns about climate change.
“Individual storms are statistical. Climate change creates a change in the climate whose consequences may not be directly predicted, but it makes conditions improve statistical changes of getting these kind of events,” said Doug Hammond, a professor of earth sciences. “More extreme events are more likely [to happen].”
Sam Silva, a climate scientist, advises people to be prepared for more unexpected events as climate change affects the weather.
“I think there was an unusual amount of rain,” Silva said. “I think that they really point to the fact that disaster preparedness and learning to deal with these extreme events is something that we always need to consider.”
Even public figures, including President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom, also state that this unexpected change in the weather may be caused by climate change.
“If anybody doubts that the climate is changing, then they must have been asleep during the last couple of years,” said President Biden at Seacliff State Beach along the Santa Cruz coastline, where a pier was shattered by the recent storms.
Like President Biden, Gov. Newsom took the same approach on social media about climate change effects.
“Megadroughts. Wildfires. Historic floods and atmospheric rivers. This whiplash weather is not an anomaly. California is proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously,” Gov. Newsom tweeted in January.
Residents from L.A. such as Alina Agopian, a junior majoring in psychology, have similar opinions about the issue. Agopian thinks these storms definitely come from global warming changing the climate in California.
“I definitely think this is related to climate change, how volatile our weather’s been when it gets really hot and then really cold,” she said.
Typically, La Niña produces dry winters, a continuous pattern in the past two years, but this winter changed when Downtown L.A. got more than double the average amount of water for this time of the year.
“I think [that rain] was abnormal, probably connected with environmental change problems,” Chris Kuo, an electrical engineering graduate student, said.
Some residents enjoy seeing this happening in L.A., stating that it is good to have some water in the dry city.
“I enjoyed [the rain] because we don’t get a lot of it in Los Angeles. The past few years have been really dry so it was nice to have consistent rain,” Agopian said. “It was more rain than I have seen here in many years.”
California’s drought has been the state’s driest three-year period recorded, according to officials.
Others do not feel the same way since it makes it difficult to commute.
“I always have to travel to school so all that water generated by the rain was a problem for me,” Kuo said.
Despite La Niña’s forecast, a weather phenomenon that occurs when the temperature of the sea is cooler than average in the eastern Pacific, which results in less evaporation, weaker storms and more drought, a series of about 10 storms hit the state, bringing unusual precipitation for this part of the year.
After all this rain, the Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service, indicated an anticipated transition from La Niña to El Niño Southern Oscillation neutral (ENSO-neutral), a climate pattern where neither La Niña nor El Niño (a weather phenomenon synonymous of wet winters in Southern California) are present, during the February to April 2023 season.
On the other hand, some scientists interviewed by the L.A. Times said these storms might not be connected with climate change.
Although scientists are still investigating the severity of these storms, researchers stated that they still do not have enough evidence to make that connection.
“We know from climate models that global warming will boost California storms of the future, but we haven’t made that connection with the latest storm systems,” said Alexander Gershunov, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography interviewed by the L.A. Times.
Even if people think all these storms are connected to the effects of climate change, scientists state that it is hard to do this directly since they need more proof to confirm it even if they assume that it is related to it.
“I think that attributing that an individual event was directly because of climate change is a very difficult scientific thing to say,” Silva said. “There is variability, large rain does happen even if we would not get any CO2 emissions.”
“While we can’t say yet what fraction of the rain we saw in January can be attributed to climate change, we do know that these events are more likely in a warming world and we do know that the world is warming because of CO2,” he added.
Early reviews suggest that these storms may have more to do with California’s historic drought cycles than with climate change.
They state that these unexpected natural hazards after three years of severe drought look similar to other major storms that happened in California around every decade since the 1800s.
Within the last century, Southern California experienced the “Great Flood of 1938,” a natural disaster that caused the death of more than 100 people, caused a lot of damage to infrastructure and led L.A. officials to line the Los Angeles River with concrete to prevent flooding.
Also, more storms were recorded in history such as in 1964, 1969, 1982, 1986, 1995 and 2005, when a school camp located 3,600 feet above Pasadena in the Los Angeles National Forest, recorded 107 inches of rain in just one week.
But that does not mean that the past storms follow this same pattern.
“Climate change can lead to unusual timing to these events, so that’s something to keep in mind and get those umbrellas handy,” Hammond said.