A Pineapple Express storm is set to California on Wednesday, January 31st. You might be asking yourself, “I wonder what a Pineapple Express storm is?” And I am here to explain it!
A Pineapple Express storm is an atmospheric river storm that dumps a ton of rain, by definition: “Narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport much of the moisture from the tropics to northern latitudes.” They can also dump inches of snow, if its in a higher elevation. Unluckily for California, they can expect both.
There is an estimated 4-7 inches of rain to come down in Southern California, and for the higher elevation Northern California, they have a chance of getting snow. The storm is expected to last an entire week and wil bring some colder tempratures as well, and if the rain and snow wasnt enough, they can also expect to be hit with 40 mile per hour winds. These storms normally come in waves, and the first one is expected to hit Northern California on Wednesday night.
Meteorlogists arent expecting this to be very destructive, but are expecting some stream flooding and disturbing winds, the major cities this first storm will affect are San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities that are in the Bay Area.
Its all fun and games, until the second storm comes. The second storm is bringing colder air than the first storm, more precipitation, and more as well as faster wind gusts. The Second storm is expected to hit mid-day sunday. There is a storm in the Sierra-Nevada (a mountain range in California) and they are expecting quite a bit of snowfall due to the high elevation (10k-14k feet).
Southern California is going to get dumped on with quite a few inches of rain, as well as wind gusts that will get north of 70 miles per hour. With this amount of rain fall, they can expect some flooding of not only streams, rivers, and other bodies of water, but also streets. It is likely there will be flooding, but it all comes down to how fast the rain falls, if it is fairly spread out the flooding will not be bad, but if it all comes at once, there will be more flooding. The second storm, could bring Southern California two to three times the amount of percipitation as the first storm.
Pineapple Express storms are not extremely common, as the last one hit California almost a year ago, in March 2023. That one hit worse than this one is expected. There was 13 inches of rain, tons of flooding in the valleys and in the streets, and there was even 13 tallied deaths, which is unfortunate.
