It is hard to imagine, but the flash floods and thunderstorms that took more than two dozen lives over the last week in Texas and Oklahoma, and washed away hundreds of homes, could provide good news for drought-stricken California.  A developing El Niño weather event in the Pacific Ocean that can be linked to the deadly downpours in Oklahoma and Texas may be getting stronger, meteorologists say. A strong El Niño in the late fall and early winter tends to be associated with wetter winters in California.  “There is evidence, if you look back at past El Niño events,” said Tim DiLiberto, a meteorologist with the NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, “that if you have a strong El Niño, it is usually associated with rainfall in California.”  California entered its fourth year of drought this year, with Governor Jerry Brown announcing unprecedented state-imposed water reductions. Texas and Oklahoma, meanwhile, saw a five-year drought come to an end this month with the arrival of thunderstorms, tornadoes and disastrous floods.  DiLiberto warned that “seasonal predictions in general are very difficult”, and described the chances of a stronger El Niño and a wet California winter as “uncertain”, if still “above average”.  Californians, though, are eager for good news. The Los Angeles Times invited its readers to look east this week, towards the disaster-stricken areas of Texas and Oklahoma, precisely because of what a strong El Niño might mean for them.  “What this exemplifies is something that applies to climate variation in the short and long term,” said Anthony Broccoli, a professor in the department of environmental sciences at Rutgers University. “That one particular pattern may produce weather conditions viewed favorably in one place and less favorably somewhere else.”  Broccoli called this a seesaw effect that has long occurred in the US, with mild and dry winters on the west coast sometimes meaning cold and stormy winters on the east coast.  But as the effects of global warming kick in, Broccoli said, evidence shows that already dry areas of the world – like California – will become drier.  The warming of the planet was also expected to make rain events heavier, he said, with locations getting greater fractions of their total ratio of rainfall during those heavy precipitations, meaning light or moderate rain events would become rarer.  As such events become more usual, the solution to ending extreme weather patterns may not lie in opposite extremes.  “The ideal to end a drought are rains that cumulatively amount to a lot and are not quite as intense,” Broccoli said.  Heavy and intense rainfall is precisely the kind of phenomenon that caused flash floods in Oklahoma and Texas. Last week, the Weather Channel reported that a river in Blanco, Texas had risen as fast as 17ft in half an hour between Friday and Saturday, with water crushing and stripping the insides of nearby homes.  A possible rainier winter in California may carry its own extreme weather events like landslides, Broccoli said.  DiLiberto cautioned against perceiving El Niño as the answer to California’s drought problem.  “Any rain will help, but we are starting from a very low point. It will take a pretty substantial amount of rain to remove multiple drought years in just one year,” he said, adding that the volume of rain needed to end the drought would likely have knock-on landslide effects.  Besides, El Niño-enhanced rain would still not help resolve the depleted snowpack in northern California, DiLiberto said.  “El Niños don’t mean bad things all the time, but sometimes it’s too much of a good thing,” he said.
A brewing El Niño brought deadly downpours to Texas and Oklahoma, but could be just what California needs to temper its drought crisis