It's The West Coast's Turn To Get A Huge Stormy Blast

Satellite view of the "Pineapple Express"
storm pounding California today  

I've been harping on the slow, strange storm that has dumped heavy wet snow on parts of New England and New York the past couple of days -- 30,000 homes and businesses STILL without power in Vermont as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

Meanwhile, though, an even more intense storm is raging on the West Coast.

As of this afternoon, 220,000 California homes and businesses had no electricity in the face of huge winds and torrential downpours.

This is a classic "Pineapple Express" storm that' snow smacking California. The state has had what some say is the worst drought in 1,200 years (!!) so these storms have been few and far between.

The one hitting California now is probably the strongest one to hit the state since 2009.

A Pineapple Express storm is so named because this type of system grabs a fistful of tropical moisture from near Hawaii and arranges it into a fairly narrow atmospheric river that makes a beeline to the California coast.

Normally, this type of storm is a bad thing. A Pineapple Express usually causes damaging winds, torrential, destructive flooding rains and blizzards up in the Sierra Nevada.

This storm is doing all these things, but of course there's a major silver lining this year: The rain is indeed coming down too hard, too fast, and will create flooding.

Kids play on a shopping cart in flooded Healdsburg, CA.
Photo by Eric Risberg/AP  

But it's also putting a dent in the epic drought I've mentioned. They had a pretty good rainstorm last week, which moisten the ground and greened things up a little bit.

The storms over the past week or two in California haven't really translated into filling near-empty reservoirs. The last rains sort of just soaked into the ground and didn't run off much.

As Eric Holthaus in Slate points out, now that the ground is a little wetter, this storm is apt to cause some runoff, and fill the reservoirs a little bit.

It won't solve all of the drought woes in California. But it will help.

Another good thing about this storm: It's going to be a slightly colder one than the last one.

California depends on a deep snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains to gradually melt off in the spring, feeding drinking water supplies and agriculture in the valleys below.

But California has had near record warmth lately, continuing a trend that's gone on all year. The last storm was very warm, and it rained in most of the Sierra Nevada range. So they don't yet have a good start on building a snow pack.

This time, it is snowing big time in the Sierra. A blizzard warning is up for those mountains.

It's wild up there today. One high elevation weather station reported a gust of 147 mph. A few other high elevation spots reported gusts of between 80 and 110 mph.

One of the biggest concerns is the heavy rain falling on areas that endured forest fires amid the drought this year.

The fires left no vegetation left to soak up some of the heavy rain, and no roots to hold soil in place. So in the fire areas, there is a great fear of mudslides, debris flows and flash flooding. 

One more bright side to all this California storminess: The big waterfalls at Yosemite National Park are flowing again, after being dry for much of the summer and autumn.