PD Editorial: ‘Godzilla’ and California’s long drought

Sizzling heat and smoky skies - it was a double whammy this week for North Coast residents.

But temperatures are falling to more comfortable levels after some of Sonoma County’s highest highs in five years, and the air is clearing as winds shift and firefighters gain control over the enormous wildfires burning in Lake County.

Is it too much to hope for a break in California’s drought, too?

Maybe not. But, as Aesop warned, be careful what you ask for.

For several months, climate scientists have been reporting strengthening El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean - rising water temperatures and weakening trade winds that can signal abnormally wet weather for California in the fall and winter.

As new data make forecasters more confident, reminders that El Niño fizzled last year and caveats that drought-busting storms aren’t assured are giving way to suggestions that an El Niño winter exceeding the strongest ever recorded could be shaping up in 2015.

“This definitely has the potential of being the Godzilla El Niño,” Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times last week.

If that sounds ominous, it should.

The biggest El Niño on record was in 1997, when average precipitation was twice the annual average throughout much of California.

After four years of crippling drought, the Golden State is desperate for some wet weather - rain to fill shrinking reservoirs and recharge badly depleted aquifers, snow to cover the barren peaks of the Sierra that typically provide about a third of the water used by the state’s farms and cities in the form of spring runoff.

Unfortunately, the storms of late 1997 and early 1998 brought more than rain and snow.

Southern California experienced devastating mudslides, Northern California, including the Russian River basin, catastrophic floods. Seventeen people died, and damage from the storms exceeded $1 billion.

This year’s El Niño already may be wreaking havoc. Weather experts say warm ocean water in the Tropics probably contributed to the record rains and flash floods that inundated Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico in late May.

Emergency officials are assessing whether the state is prepared for a wild winter, as some people ask whether a visit from Godzilla would be enough to end the drought.

State water officials don’t think so. They estimate that it would take 75 inches of precipitation in the northern Sierra to offset the effects of four years of drought. That’s about 150 percent of average annual rain and snowfall totals, and it’s more than any El Niño winter on record.

Moreover, they say, a review of records from seven significant El Niño years since 1950 shows three wet winters, three dry winters and one average winter. And, of course, climate scientists warn that California is likely to experience longer and more frequent dry spells.

So if there is any drought relief this winter, it may be a temporary respite.