Atmospheric River

 

 

Who knew there was such a thing as an atmospheric river?  We didn’t know about them when we were kids in Southern California.  Recognizing atmospheric rivers is a relatively new thing.  That term didn’t even come into existence until the 1990s.  I think the pattern didn’t get recognized until we started to get a more global view of weather using data provided by satellites.

 

When we were kids, some years we just got so much rain it was fun to play in.  The grassy park in front of our house would flood and the standing water would last for days.  We could run and slide and play tag while soaking wet.  Dad had some old track shoes with dangerously pointed spikes on the toes.  (Who knows why Dad had old track shoes.  Never heard of him ever running track.  With all the strange stuff that could be found lying around our house though, it would be fun to be able to ask him about all of it now.)  We took turns wearing the track shoes and outrunning everyone else.  Barefoot, we could get out the skim boards and go skimming without even walking to the beach.  We couldn’t count on flooding rains like that happening every year.  They only happened once in a while.  In fact, I only remember two of them during the ten years of my childhood there.  They were sure fun when they did happen though, and we looked forward to them.  I wasn’t aware of anyone being put out by them.  We lived on level ground that drained into the ocean (and was well above the height of the ocean so it only flowed one direction).  It would have been scarier if we lived on or below a hillside that was turning to mush and being pulled down by gravity.

 

The atmospheric river currently flowing into our old neighborhood in Southern California doesn’t sound like much fun for a lot of the people that are there now.  Probably the more the land is developed, and it has developed a lot since the 1950s, the less the water can dissipate naturally, and the consequences of heavy rain events are more severe.  Who knew back then we were wishing atmospheric rivers on ourselves?