A “Godzilla El Nino“?
A strong El Niño can shift a subtropical jet stream that normally pours rain over the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America toward California and the southern United States.
But so much rain all at once has proved devastating to California in the past. In early 1998, storms brought widespread flooding and mudslides, causing 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars in damage in California. Downtown L.A. got nearly a year’s worth of rain in February 1998.
Of course, the problem with that is that most of it just goes into the ocean, no way to catch water that rains downtown. We really need snowpack up in the Sierra, and to fill the reservoirs, but at least amidst all the upcoming damage, it looks like that might happen this winter.
On another note, if the Panama Canal is low on water due to drought, couldn’t they pump it up the locks? But I guess they want fresh water in the upper canals, not salt.
LA desperately needs to apply good land management techniques to capture the torrential rainfalls that are common to the area and put that water into the soil instead of concrete canyons. Brad Lancaster in Tucson AZ has demonstrated at the scale of individual residential lots how effective it can be. If most properties in the desert southwest applied these methods, the LA river could have the concrete removed and be allowed to become a real river again, rather than a storm drain.
http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/
Pump it? With what pumps? And powered by what?
An El Niño so powerful that it can only be called… ¡El Dingo!
Coming soon, from the studio that brought you “Machete!”