Heavy California rains par for the course for climate change

Stanford News


March 21, 2017Heavy California rains par for the course for climate change Stanford climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh explains why heavy rains during a drought are to be expected for a state in the throes of climate change.





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By Ker Than

Here’s a question that Stanford climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh gets asked a lot lately: “Why did California receive so much rain lately if we’re supposed to be in the middle of a record-setting drought?”
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Kurt Hickman

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Stanford Professor Noah Diffenbaugh warns that heavy California rains like those experienced this past winter are here to stay.

When answering, he will often refer the questioner to a Discover magazine story published in 1988, when Diffenbaugh was still in middle school.
The article, written by veteran science writer Andrew Revkin, detailed how a persistent rise in global temperatures would affect California’s water system. It predicted that as California warmed, more precipitation would fall as rain rather than snow, and more of the snow that did fall would melt earlier in the season. This in turn would cause reservoirs to fill up earlier, increasing the odds of both winter flooding and summer droughts.
“It is amazing how the state of knowledge in 1988 about how climate change would affect California’s water system has played out in reality over the last three decades,” said Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth System Science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
Diffenbaugh, who specializes in using historical observations and mathematical models to study how climate change affects water resources, agriculture, and human health, sees no contradiction in California experiencing one of its wettest years on record right on the heels of a record-setting extended drought.
“When you look back at the historical record of climate in California, you see this pattern of intense ...


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