A Tale of Two Problems
Atmospheric Rivers and the California Republic
By Spencer A. Backman, Global News Editor
Atmospheric rivers is a weather event that can cause massive amounts of precipitation. California has been facing record droughts, so are weather events good or bad?
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration an atmospheric river is “long, narrow regions in the atmosphere-like rivers in the sky-that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics.”
Atmospheric rivers are natural and normal parts of the atmosphere that cause precipitation in places where there would not otherwise be. The one that affects California is called the Pineapple Express (NOAA.gov). It brings water from the area around Hawaii to the western United States.
Up until 2020, the Pineapple Express was not delivering California the rain it needed. There was a severe drought in most of the state until then.
In the past few years, Pineapple Express has been making up for lost time. There has been record rainfall in California in 2022 and 2023. In 2023, the rain was so extreme that it refilled a lake in central California that had been dry for 50 years, creating the largest body of water west of the Mississippi River.
In 2022 and 2023, that record rain was accompanied by a record single daily snowfall in parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains as well as the Rocky Mountains, causing a surplus of water in areas that had known drought for decades. Ski season ran into May in parts of Colorado.
What seems like a long-needed blessing can also be a curse. In that dry lakebed sat most of America’s pistachio farms as well as other crucial crops and often the small farmers plots were flooded before the cooperate farmland.
However, it can go both ways. That land was soon to be unfarmable, the water table was running dry and the mountains could not keep up. Now, the aquifers underneath that land will be filled with water that will last for years if not decades. Some farmers will rebuild when the water goes down and their children will have a place to build and farm for years to come.
Ski resorts had been troubled by a lack of snow in the early season, but when the snow came and allowed the season to run late the tourism in some towns flourished.
Lynn University can understand that Boca Raton is a tourist town just like most of South Florida. Lynn knows that when weather is bad, it can destroy homes. Many Lynn students are locals who have lived through and seen the damage of major storms.
That is one of the reasons why Lynn focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The world and climate are changing.
If Lynn graduates are better prepared to understand that shift when they work in tourism, sustainability, or business and they are asked about how the climate will affect their employer, they will have an answer.
