The science behind California's wet winter, in maps
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This puts a name to something I was observing in Apple Weather these past few months (I’ve been spending some time in there just observing weather, partly due to Dark Sky shutting down and partly due to the onslaught of storms that hit us). If you spend enough time observing a radar map of weather around the globe, what becomes apparent is the source of a lot of water. A lot of the “atmospheric rivers” that hit California appeared to have their origins southeast of the Philippines. Actually there’s a lot of crazy weather going on between Northern Australia and Southern China.
You’ll also see this nearly contiguous belt of rain just circumnavigating along the Equator from West to East. Notable stops along this route if you don’t know your Equatorial geography include Tanzania where Mt. Kilimanjaro is, Lake Victoria which is the source of the Nile, most of the World’s Rainforests, the Andes which are functionally this enormous moisture trap that turns most of eastern South America into this giant drainage basin, and interesting enough that little spot southeast of the Philippines that seemed to be continuously feeding the storms that hit the West Coast in North America.
This is apparently Madden-Julian oscillation and taking a quick glance at the Wikipedia page, that appears to be exactly what I was looking at. If I were looking in the Summer, I might have seen a connection to the monsoon season in India because it is apparently linked to those too via its oscillations. This is neat. This is the best article to hit Hacker News today since it taught me something new.
From an old blog post of mine, written November 2017.
California has about one quarter of America's homeless population, likely due in part to the history of dry, temperate weather in large parts of California. If Cali is going to generally trend hotter and wetter, we need to more urgently than ever find solutions for getting people into permanent housing and keeping them there.
As the weather extremes increase, I think that fewer and fewer people will be able to survive in poverty stricken areas and they'll be pushed into homelessness. I just don't see the US ever really dealing with the situation, plus we're going to keep automating jobs out of existence, so universal basic income is actually needed. My parents generation does not understand the challenges today and they've managed to effectively block changes in government.
In order to help people we need to find ways to drastically cut costs on housing. First start with the land: there's more acres of land in CA than people. the problem is just we're not allowed to build anything, anywhere. Secondly, we need to remove all the regulatory roadblocks that prevent markets from solving the housing crisis. if 3rd world countries can afford to build housing, we should be at least be able to do so as well.