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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

I live in Vancouver - my coworkers and family were very aware of this, watching footage online and exclaiming at the brutal nature of the weather and landslides we experienced yesterday. Never seen this many roads closed in BC in my nearly 4 decades living here.

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The whole upper pacific coastline is experiencing it. There is a lot of flooding along the Oregon coast as well with cars/trailers floating away and evacuations. Intense rains for days at a time. I mean we get a lot of rain here, but this has been pretty crazy and constant.

Let's hope it migrates further south and relieves some of the California drought. Any meteorologists have a sense of the weather patterns at play here?

Oh, the atmospheric river did hit California, and pretty hard in some places. Last month was the wettest October on record here in San Francisco. The area around Dixie (where there was a big fire earlier this year) saw landslides.

According to a podcast I listened to, this pattern might actually be bad because alternating cycles of extreme rain and extreme dryness means more vegetation growth during the wet months which in turn means more fuel to burn during the dry months.

The loss of established growth hurts in the rainy season too as landslides worsen. In our local San Bernardino mountains here burn patches quickly turn to land or mudslides.

It looks like we will be in another La Nina year, which means wetter northwest and drier southwest.. unfortunately.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/la-nina-california-dro...

That's not saying much anymore - the systems getting more and more unpredictable. The last La Nina was also supposed to worsen the ongoing drought but ended up dumping so much water that the state of emergency (or whatever its called) was withdrawn that March. IIRC it did dry out the San Diego area a bit, where the drought wasn't as bad.

According to this meteorologist “Drier-than-average winter still most likely outcome for most of California” https://weatherwest.com/archives/11748

Average winter seems a distant memory in Cali.

2017 and 2019 were big Sierra snowpack years, double average. I don't mean this to be a comment on long term trends.

Typically it's snowpack that relieves drought. All torrential rain does is remove topsoil and blow out bridges

Torrential rain can replace water in underground aquifers. But there is only so much water that can be absorbed by the ground, much of it just rushes out to sea.

If you don't mind two international border crossings, there actually is a way to drive from Vancouver to the rest of Canada.

For example: https://imgur.com/a/MAqFSHd

Much more difficult at the moment, due to COVID.

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