 Hi, I'm Brian May. And I'm Monica Vargas. We are coming to you live from our Cal OES Newsroom this afternoon. Coming up one year after record flooding, Mother Nature has again turned her faucet off, at least for now, a very dry winter so far. So where are we in relation to where we need to be with our water this winter? And how much does climate change have to do with it? Are we in El Niño, La Niña, or none of the above year? We have five simple steps you can do to help conserve water in your house. So we want to hear your questions regarding the weather and how it relates to emergency response. We have a great panel lined up and we are live. Coming up next. And again, welcome inside what we call our newsroom, also known as our office. We are at Cal OES Headquarters at Mater. My name is Brian May along with Monica Vargas and we have a couple of special guests with us today. We do. We have Michelle Mead, meteorologist with the National Weather Service and Nicole Meyer Morse, Cal OES Science and Technology Advisor. Thank you, ladies, both for joining us today. We appreciate you taking time out of your day. And we want to also include you on part of this live broadcast. So along those lines, we have our colleague, Sean Boyd, who is ready to take your question. Sean. Boy, am I ever? I am here. I've got my laptop. I've got my phone. Send us your questions. We're going to get them answered for you live. All right, Sean. Thank you very much. And we'll go to him throughout the show with your questions. So again, let him know. I want to start this conversation, first of all, with where we are now, whether wise. So, Michelle, I'll turn to you. I know it has been a dry winter so far, really up and down the state. Right. It's definitely been on again, off again, kind of a roller coaster when it comes to precipitation. We have seen above average months in November transitioning to very dry. And that, of course, has had an impact on our snowpack. We're looking at that snowpack video. And I know, Michelle, you were there just a couple of weeks ago. Describe what you're doing here and what you're checking for. So when you do a snow survey, it's not just one spot. You go and check and say, that's the snow amount. What we do is we go into an area and we take multiple measurements and we average those measurements, melt it down. And in this case, we weigh it to find out what the snow water or content is because it's not so much the depth of snow, but the amount of water that's within the snow. And we're definitely a lot less than we were this time last year. In fact, we're running at about 2015 levels for snowpack. But the good news is, is we had a very above average year last year. So even the snow from last year is still helping to supplement some of the reservoirs of this year. And the reservoirs are actually doing quite well. All right. We're going to go back to that snowpack real quick. Here's a recap of what they said there. Well, we're at the Philip snow course, February 1, 2018. We just measured a depth of snow of 13.6 inches, a water content of 2.6 inches, representing 14% of its historic average. So the number I take from that, he said 14% of average. That doesn't seem like that would be a good number. It's not, but you also have to keep in mind that's one location and there are sensors up and down the Sierra. But even the statewide or Sierra average is only, I think today is about 22%. Like I said, we're running on par with the 2015 number. So the snowpack is concerned that's not a good thing, but you'll have to look at the whole water picture to see where we are as far as potential drought going forward. All right. Let's see if we have any questions now from our audience. So we're going to go back over to Sean Boyd. Yeah, of course we do. We have one here that actually we have quite a few questions that have come in to us. The first one I'm going to throw out is, and this may be a little bit more gear for Michelle here, but it says, how do we know whether we are going into another drought cycle? I think that's something we all wonder. There's two definitions of drought. There is a meteorological drought, which is really the absence of precipitation compared to normal. And then there is the more impact or political based drought, which deals with agriculture losses, folks having to pump in water, livestock stock losses, things of that nature. We are, if you are looking strictly at the numbers, heading into a meteorological drought, which means the amount of precipitation we would normally see is below average. So if you're looking at strictly the rainfall and the snow amount, we are below where we should be. Now, like I said, you have to look at the whole picture. We're still seeing benefits from last year's record rainfall, and that can be seen in our reservoir conditions and also the stream flows are below average, but they're not in the drought capacity. So we're definitely seeing some below average precip. I'd normally dry as what you would see on the drought monitor map here in Northern California. But the other thing you have to keep in mind is Southern California. They've actually never had a break from our drought. So even when Northern California went white, meaning there was no depiction, Southern California still had a hint of the drought, and unfortunately that is starting to creep back north yet again this year. Thank you. So Nicole, we hear the term climate change. Can you tell us what that means and especially what it means to us in our world of emergency management? Certainly. So climate change has had a huge impact on what we do. We respond to all kinds of emergencies, and most of them are natural disasters, which are being exacerbated by climate change. So for example, we had an epic five-year drought, which was ended by extensive flooding, which we had three federal disaster declarations for. What resulted from that is a large amount of vegetation growth leading to the two major wildfires that we had in Northern and Southern California, both of which were federal declarations as well. So looking at that as a whole, we've had five declarations in a year, federal declarations. And what we need to do as an agency is understand that this is going to keep happening and climate change is going to continue to exacerbate the disasters that we face. And so we need to figure out what we can do to help communities be prepared for the fact that climate change is going to continue to impact them in disasters and what we can do to enable them to invest in resiliency. So creating urban wildland interfaces to help fight the forest fires that are inevitable, creating communities that have culverts that can handle the flooding that can happen. And what we're really excited about is enabling communities to be more drought resilient. So creating managed aquifer recharge capability, which is something that we haven't done in the past with some of the funding we received from the federal declarations. One of the scariest things I think we hear now is this is the new norm. And sadly, that's true. It is. Describe again what that means for emergency management. I mean, if you think back to 2017, we had our floods, right? And then that was eclipsed by the, you know, massive hurricanes that we saw, which hurricanes are really unpredictable. So it's difficult to associate climate change with hurricanes, but we had three major hurricanes sweep through. Then we had the fires here. And if you think about it, again, we had fires in December, which is unbelievable. And as we were talking earlier about, we had red flag warnings recently in Southern California in, you know, February. So the fire season isn't just a season anymore. It's kind of a year round thing. So that's, it's something we need to be aware of and understand that it's something that we need. It is our new reality and it's affecting everything that we do and that the communities need to respond to. We as the state need to be able to help the communities and it's something that's our, that is our new reality. When we're activated in the State Operations Center, which is just behind us, we have task forces that meet all throughout the day. Almost every meeting begins first off with the briefing from the National Weather Service. I don't think a lot of people realize just how closely we work hand in hand because most of what we do is based on what happens with the weather. Right. And, you know, everyone remembers the natural catastrophe, whether that be the fire or the rain, but there's the mitigation and the recovery after that and the weather impacts that as well. When we had the fires in Lake and Napa counties, you know, now you've got all these people evacuated into tents and shelters and wind and rain can impact them more than you would think they should. So it's definitely one of those things that we all take it for granted, me included. You know, everyone knows what the weather is, but you have to look at circumstances of what people are at and it really truly impacts everyone every day. I know Michelle, you guys just at the National Weather Service put out this graphic, I think it was last week or so, and the graphic basically is what is La Nina. We're going to put that graphic up and describe to us what we're seeing and kind of what the message is on that. So La Nina and El Nino is basically terms that were given to the warming and cooling of the waters near the equator. And they have been around for centuries. They were named by fishermen and they would notice increases or decrease in their fishing based on the water temperature. So if it was warm waters, better fishing, cold waters, poorer fishing. And they also discovered there were some weather changes, weather pattern changes that resulted from the ocean temperatures. So through the years we've named them El Nino and La Nina, but we've only had the technical capability to measure that and what it does to the weather for about 68 years. So we've had records now for 68 years and typically in a cooling scenario like we're in right now the weather pattern or the jet stream will actually shift north. And the Pacific Northwest and the northern tier states of the country will see cooler and wetter conditions. The south typically sees drier, warmer conditions. Well California is a long skinny state. So both El Nino and La Nina have these potential weather pattern changes and California is literally on the edge of both. So the northern California sometimes benefits from La Nina and southern California sometimes benefits from El Nino. But I can't tell you which year we're going to get impacted. Everyone remembers the Godzilla El Nino 2015. Southern California had no rain. And we had a normal year. So that's why forecasting here. I've been doing this for 23 years. Definitely the hardest place to forecast. It's called job security, right? Yes, it is. All right. I know after five plus years of historic drought this time last year, and then Nicole, you talked about this as well. But this time last year we were having massive rains all over the state, especially in northern California. And those heavy rains, although they weren't damaging, they did help kind of refill the reservoirs that were depleted. They helped us get some places that really were dire straits back out of the drought area. So Nicole and Michelle, I'll ask both of you, where are we with what we need water-wise for the state, both as far as a daily impact and then from a state standpoint getting people back on their feet? Nicole? I will say from the drought resiliency sustainability aspect, I think we need to be innovative in what we do. Instead of being reactionary towards, okay, we're in a drought, let's switch to desalination. I think we really need to look at what technology is out there that will enable us to, for example, capture the floodwater that ran off last year that we could have put back into the groundwater. And that's really important because there's a huge amount of subsidence in the Central Valley, which means that as water is drawn from the underground aquifer, the land sinks and you lose that capability to store that groundwater. Forever. Forever. So there's an image up here, and I believe I saw the yellow causeway up there where there was, and if you drove across it, you felt like you were on a lake. Yeah. So the majority of it went out to sea. We lost it. So if we could have diverted that to communities, those that are really impacted by the drought, so there's a community, and I believe to Larry County, who their wells are dry. So if we could enable those communities to capture the floodwaters when it's at this stage so that they have this drought resiliency, I think that's what we need to do to enable our state to be more resilient to future droughts. Regardless of if we're entering one now, we're going to, that's the inevitability of living here in California. So in addition to what you just kind of spoke to, what else should we be doing right now? Well, we should always keep in mind that we live in California. And that we're going to have really wet ears, but we are going to have droughts, and that's just an inevitability of it. And so we always need to be water conscious. You know, from my personal perspective, it's not, you know, it's potentially removing your grass and replacing it with plants that don't require water, having drip line irrigation. It's what you can do at your house. If a community does that and it spreads to the larger community, that can have a huge impact. That's a way of life. It's a way of life here. Michelle, let's say the faucet turns on and we turn this dry winter around. It's not that much as too much right away. That's pretty much the norm of California. Typically our flooding is too much too fast. Last winter, like Nicole alluded to, we definitely had the faucet on the whole time, but it was actually timed perfectly. This stuff that, the rain that came in the fall, came in nice increments, that it was able to be absorbed by the soil, and there wasn't a whole lot of runoff at the beginning. It also was able to fill the reservoirs and the rivers had plenty of room, so it actually worked out perfectly. This winter, like I said, we're still reaping some benefits from last year, but the reservoirs are still quite full. She had mentioned about the management of the water. Even last year, when we were getting all that rain, there was a lot of effort by the state and federal water projects to move that to Southern California. Unfortunately, yes, we did lose quite a bit of it into the ocean, what we couldn't hold anymore. The bathtub was full, and we couldn't hold anymore. California, most people live here because we have six months of beautiful, sunny weather and lately very, very hot weather. The water consumption tends to go up in the summer, but like Nicole mentioned, we're more in the dry than we are in the wet lately. I've only been here for five years, and I can see that already. Like she mentioned, even me personally, my husband and I were talking about, we have a pretty big patch of grass that we're like, well, maybe we should, you know, get rid of that or shorten it or I've already got the water timers in the shower for my kids. Like, okay, when that's off, it's time to get out. Yep, because it is our new norm. Conservation is always a good idea to do in California just because we don't know year to year what we're going to see. We do have some tips before we get to those. Let's go back over to Sean real quick. You got some more questions, Sean? Yes, in fact, I do. Taking a look here, one person has asked, so how do we compare with other states when it comes to this crazy sort of changing weather pattern? Well, how do we compare? How do we compare? Well, California, I always like to say we're kind of the red-headed stepchild. There's normals that everybody looks at for, and even us, you know, to compare our water year. And we like to throw out the eight station, the five station, and the six station normals. And we look at a 30 year, so you can capture all those extremes, and the drys. But Mike Anderson, the state climatologist, works with some researchers to see how much those normals vary across the country. And they came up with this really neat graphic that basically has all the climate points across the United States, and based on the annual variability, they color-coded them. So it goes anywhere from 10% all the way to 70% variability. And as you get closer to the West Coast, those colors increase. If you live on the East Coast, and your average rainfall year is 50 inches, that varies maybe by a tenth of an inch. Out here, if our average rainfall is 40 inches, it can vary by 70% up or down. And unfortunately, during the drought, we saw that 70% reduction, and then last year, we saw the 70% increase. And that can happen in California any year. So I throw rainfall out there because we live and die by water here in California, and that's kind of the best way to measure. But our summers are definitely getting hotter. It's not so much the high temperatures. It's actually the minimum temperatures, and it's those minimum temperatures that have a greater impact on our infrastructure and our people, our vulnerable populations, because that's our body's time to recover. And if we can't cool down, and our body temperatures can't cool down, same with livestock, that's when we start seeing the impacts. Yeah, and I think she's psychic because she's getting the number 70%. I've got another one that involves 70%. It actually says, when a forecast is given, and it calls for a 70% chance of rain, does it mean that you will have seven chances out of 10 to receive rain, or will 70% of your area receive rain? What's the difference there? So this is where the geeky meteorologist versus personal perception comes into play. So as a meteorologist, when we're looking at a 70% chance, to me that says, if I live in this area and it's a 70% chance, I better have some backup plants. It's seven out of 10 chance. Most likely. It's most likely. But because we're doing it on an aerial platform, if you happen to be in the 30% that isn't going to see that potential, then you're okay. So if you hear 70% and you're looking at this particular point and that one says 70%, you better have a backup plant. That's what I always say. Makes sense. What is it? 70% of the time it'll rain 100% of the time, right? That's right. Sean, are you done? Just to follow up on that, if I'm looking at my phone and I've got the National Weather Service app and it says for, let's say, Penrin or Roseville and it says 70% chance of rain, that's the area that I should know there is a 70% chance of rain not within the area. That's what you were talking about. Correct. Okay. All right, one more quick thing here. And this happens to go with debris flow. And I think this is obviously on the heels of what just happened in Montecito. Is there a way to tell when a debris flow is about to happen? There's... Do you want to take it? I can start. I can start from what I do understand about debris flow. So there is a debris flow task force that is stood up after we've had these fires and it is to try and identify areas that are at risk if there is a rainfall event. The difficult part about it is that you have to be able to identify how much rain will fall in a particular area in what amount of time and that will tell you the risk. And that's really hard to predict correct me if I'm wrong. That's one piece of the puzzle. So you have to look at burn severity, the slope of the area. And like she said, the intensity and duration of the rain. Like I mentioned earlier, most of California flooding is too much rain in a short amount of time. And when you do that rain on top of what's just burned, that exacerbates because not only is the rain coming down, but there's nothing to soak up that rain anymore. So as soon as you get a crack or a fissure in that, it's just going to come down. It's going to take it all with it. And unfortunately, that's what we saw in Montecito. But it is difficult to predict because there are so many variables going into it. And so you have levels of risk and you have to decide what you're going to do. Yeah, and we, as the Weather Service, meteorologists and hydrologists, we work with the USGS. So after fire, what happens is they send folks out to actually test the soil. And there's satellite images that say, this looks like it's severely burned. Somebody goes out and says, yep, it's severely burned down to six inches, eight inches. And then they'll overlay that on the geography and say, okay, well, this slope, given this burn severity, has a high risk. So then when we're watching the forecast and seeing where the rainfall is going to come in, even with the Montecito, we had a pretty good idea that the Bernadino and Ventura counties were going to be high risk. We looked at the storm coming in and it looked the trajectory of that precipitation that that was going to be a pretty vulnerable area based on the recent fires. And unfortunately this time the model was right and we got a lot of rain in a short amount of time and unfortunately then the mudslide. Yeah, for sure. Michelle, you're talking about Montecito there. Obviously, we were out there as a team, in Montecito, but even before, when the Thomas fire was really raging. And that was one of the things that a lot of the folks out there were talking about at the time, that they knew with the amount of grassland and the geography itself was burning besides the homes, which was tragic. But they knew that with the amount of fire that was happening, that the problem coming up in the very near future was going to be with these mudslides. And sure enough, that's exactly what we saw. Of course, everybody's fingers were crossed hoping that wasn't going to happen. But when we got, what was it, something like five, it was an incredible amount of rain, like a half inch in like five minutes or something crazy like that. That was enough to, you know, that was the straw to break that camel's back and being up there and seeing the power, the enormous amount of force that the mudslides must have had to carry boulders of small homes down. I mean, there was just no stopping that force. Incredible. So mudslides and flash floods are certainly nothing to sneeze at, nothing to, you know, take lightly, take them seriously. And in fact, that was the great thing about what Santa Barbara did is they had staged many of their search and rescue and fire folks before it actually happened. They rolled the dice, they weren't sure, but they played it safe. And they had everybody out there. Now, can you imagine if they would have had to come up from Southern California after the mudslide? They wouldn't have been able to get there, at least not quickly enough. Right, so weather, an important part of response and recovery, so we appreciate that partnership with you. So let's talk water conservation. All of us can take steps to conserve water, especially at home. So we're going to give you five simple tips that you and your family can do at home. So one of the very first things that you can do is fix the leaky faucets. Take shorter showers. Wash a full load of laundry and turn the water off when you're brushing and shaving. And lastly, water before 8 a.m. All of those tips seems like they're kind of small, I think, but when we add them up we really all need to work together on this. Water is really California's one of the most precious resources we have. And moving forward, it's something that's going to affect all of us every single day, right? And Nicole mentioned earlier the whole community partnership. That's where this really comes into play when the folks who live near a burn scar become educated, find out the information you might not have been in the burn scar but that big hill behind you that's all burned could potentially come out and get you. So the whole community gathering together, information gathering and there's plenty of resources out there sometimes it does feel overwhelming but that is a big part of it is knowing your own surroundings and of course having a plan. We're always on the September preparedness month and ready.gov has some fabulous resources to get you and your family prepared in case you do have to leave. Knowing your wrist and getting that prep kit signing up for alerts and simple things that you can do ahead of time. That's really what's going to help. And it shouldn't be an out of sight out of mind kind of thing because I know Nicole, we just stood up a community that was still suffering from the drought. We seem like we're out of the drought in Northern California but we just finished standing up a community that was still suffering from that, right? There are communities that are still suffering from drought. And so we're still in that recovery phase unbelievably so but it's true. Recovery takes a long time. It really does. Do you want more questions? Yeah, yeah, we've still got some. Keep them coming. I've got them. If you want them, I'll give them to you. So now here's one for both of you and this may be a little bit difficult to answer but we'll see how you do. How does climate change affect the strength and frequency? Strength and frequency of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. So all of the big sort of disaster type things. What do you think? Who wants to go with that one? Startering on me. You know, climate science there are many different models and feel free to talk with them anytime. There are many different models and they're all retrospective and so I think taking that forward into the future it's difficult because there are so many models. So you have to really work on identifying the community the most and California is really trying to whittle down the number of models that are out there so that communities are able to identify from a much smaller group of models which is applied to them. Anyway, the point of that is that what we're able to glean from all of this data is that climate change is exacerbating many of the types of disasters. So flooding definitely, drought definitely, hurricanes are a different beast. The science on them is from what I understand, and you're the meteorologist to jump in at any time are it's a much more difficult beast to study and so while climate may impact them the data is not entirely as solid as it is for flooding. And there's a whole connection. There is, absolutely. There's the water and atmospheric connection and like she mentioned and I mentioned earlier is one of those states that doesn't like to repeat what's on the past. So the 2015-16 snowpack is a perfect example of that because you know, 82-83 was the benchmark. We can't get any lower than this for snowpack and then 2015 came in. So it's just it's kind of two fold. There's more people in more places. So the impacts are greater. The heat seems to be getting hotter. The cold seems to be getting colder and the rain seems to be getting wetter when it comes. So it's definitely a preparedness story and it's also an education story. I mean, Mike Anderson the state climatologist is like we're kind of in the new norm. It's like our seasonal outlooks are crop shoot. You know, it's just like we can give you what happened in the past but that's no guarantee. That's what we'll see this year. So, you know, we do our best to inform you the best we can you should always be prepared. Yeah, fortunately. It's a good motto. Yeah. Go ahead, Monica. All right, so again thank you to Michelle Mead from the National Weather Service and our very own Nicole Meyer-Morris, Science and Technology Advisor. We also definitely want to thank you for your questions on behalf of myself and Monica and Sean Boyd and really all of us at Kala. We ask thank you very much for watching.