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From late December 2022 to January 2023, a series of atmospheric river storms produced widespread landsliding in the San Francisco Bay area of California. USGS scientists performed reconnaissance field work to document the extent of landsliding in the region and compiled reports of landslides from media and California Highway Patrol (CHP) reports. This data release documents locations of road cut and shallow hillslope landslides triggered between December 31, 2022 and January 18, 2023. This inventory is not intended to be a complete inventory, but a reporting of observations made with limited time and resources. The point locations include descriptions and associated attributes, described in the metadata. Media...
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In the southwestern US, the meteorological phenomenon known as atmospheric rivers (ARs) has gained increasing attention due to its strong connections to floods, snowpacks and water supplies in the West Coast states. Relatively less is known about the ecological implications of ARs, particularly in the interior Southwest, where AR storms are less common. To address this gap, we compared a chronology of AR landfalls on the west coast between 1989-2011 and between 25-42.5ºN, to annual metrics of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI; an indicator of vegetation productivity) and daily-resolution precipitation data to assess influences of AR-fed winter precipitation on vegetation productivity across the southwestern...
Dettinger, Michael, 2011. Climate Change, Atmospheric Rivers, and Floods in California – A Multimodel Analysis of Storm Frequency and Magnitude Changes. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(3):514-523. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2011.00546.xAbstract: Recent studies have documented the important role that “atmospheric rivers” (ARs) of concentrated near-surface water vapor above the Pacific Ocean play in the storms and floods in California, Oregon, and Washington. By delivering large masses of warm, moist air (sometimes directly from the Tropics), ARs establish conditions for the kinds of high snowlines and copious orographic rainfall that have caused the largest historical storms. In many...
California’s highly variable climate and growing water demands combine to pose both water-supply and flood-hazard challenges to resource managers. Recently important efforts to more fully integrate the management of floods and water resources have begun, with the aim of benefitting both sectors. California is shown here to experience unusually large variations in annual precipitation and streamflow totals relative to the rest of the US, variations which mostly reflect the unusually small average number of wet days per year needed to accumulate most of its annual precipitation totals (ranging from 5 to 15 days in California). Thus whether just a few large storms arrive or fail to arrive in California can be the difference...
    map background search result map search result map Data on influence of atmospheric rivers on vegetation productivity and fire patterns in the southwestern US San Francisco Bay Area Reconnaissance Landslide Inventory, January 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Reconnaissance Landslide Inventory, January 2023 Data on influence of atmospheric rivers on vegetation productivity and fire patterns in the southwestern US