As atmospheric rivers pick up in frequency and intensity across the globe, scientists are finding creative ways to gather more information about these destructive storms.
In simple terms, an atmospheric river is a long, narrow band of water vapor that originates over the ocean. Sometimes, they make landfall, bringing intense precipitation that can lead to flooding, landslides, and fatalities.
These weather events have long supplied important moisture to the American West, but they are becoming deadlier and costlier due to warming oceans, the Guardian reports. In fact, they are now becoming so frequent and intense that they have their own ranking scale, just like hurricanes.
For instance, a series of atmospheric river storms in California in February 2024 killed nine people and caused an estimated $11 billion in damage and economic loss as Los Angeles received half of its annual rainfall in just a few days, per the Guardian.
The second storm, nicknamed "Pineapple Express," left 875,000 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Central Coast without power, per Reuters.
Back in 2022, two atmospheric rivers in Pakistan killed at least 1,000 people and washed away entire villages, per NPR. From December 2022 to March 2023, California experienced 12 of these storms, leaving 120,000 people without power.
Though researchers have been studying atmospheric rivers for several decades, it's still difficult for them to predict exactly where a storm will make landfall or how severe it will be, the Guardian reported. Now, as oceans continue to warm, scientists are racing to better understand these weather systems and expand the accuracy of weather predictions to help communities better prepare.
Since 2016, the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program has been dropping small instruments fixed to parachutes into these storms. During their approximately 20-minute journey from cloud to ocean, the devices collect important information about air temperature, water vapor, and wind speed.
These "dropsondes" helped advance some forecasts of heavy precipitation by about 12% during the atmospheric river storms that hit California in 2023, per the Guardian.
Scientists are also releasing traditional weather balloons from the ground during storms and employing a new technology called airborne radio occultation (ARO), which helps to paint a more complete picture of a storm. ARO was used for the first time this winter and collected data up to 186 miles from a plane.
The new information collected by these technologies is all too important as flood risks grow across California and other parts of the West.
"The more we learn, the more we recognize we need more data about this," Maike Sonnewald, the leader of the computational climate and ocean group at UC Davis, told the Guardian.
Alex Hall, a UCLA atmospheric physicist and climate scientist, told the publication, "The scary thing is that if you look into the future to the point where we have twice as much warming as today, you have events that are 20% more intense, and entirely new classes of events that don't even exist now."
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