Welcome to the era of weather whiplash – Vox

California’s floods reveal a likely climate change symptom: Quick shifts between opposing weather conditions. In less than a week, the story about California’s weather shifted dramatically. Just before New Year’s Eve, the state was running out of water following two decades of severe drought. Then, it started to rain and rain..California was battered by a series of atmospheric rivers…
8 artists who are grappling with climate change and imagining a better world – Yale Climate Connections

Excerpt: From sculpture to photography, art can create space for creative solutions…
What does a pencil have to say about the future? What does a song, a smell, a coyote, or a lush Haitian garden teach us about how to live in a world in flux? Artists are examining these questions as they try to make sense of climate change…
Authorities working to determine source of oil slick off Santa Barbara coast – the Los Angeles Times

The U.S. Coast Guard was working with state officials Saturday to determine the cause of a large oil slick in the waters off Santa Barbara County.
The 1½- to 2-mile sheen was spotted Friday about five nautical miles from Summerland Beach, an area with a petroleum-rich sea floor that is home to numerous abandoned gas and oil wells…
Artists take the earth’s temperature for the World Weather Network – Art | Basel

From Iceland to Bangladesh, a new kind of weather station is mapping out the stark effects of climate change…
Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, but it’s a subject on which artists and writers have been slow starters. ‘The natural world has always been their territory,’ explains Michael Morris… ‘Yet they haven’t been part of the climate conversation in the way they might be. We wanted to combine the knowledge of scientists and the imagination of artists…’
What are atmospheric rivers? – NOAA

Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere – like rivers in the sky – that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics. These columns of vapor move with the weather, carrying an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow…
‘Rivers in the Sky’: How Atmospheric Rivers Control Nearly All of Earth’s Precipitation – Popular Mechanics

“Atmospheric rivers are literally rivers in the sky, the rivers of water vapor that transport massive amounts of water in the atmosphere,” Marty Ralph, a hydrometeorologist, tells Popular Mechanics. Ralph is the founding director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, where he has pioneered research on how atmospheric rivers influence the West Coast…
What exactly is an Atmospheric River? – USGS Communication

Atmospheric rivers have been in the news a lot over the past couple of months, from a late October atmospheric river that brought record-breaking rainfall across Northern California to a mid-November storm that led to catastrophic flooding in Washington. A new atmospheric river storm is hitting the Western U.S. now and more are likely on their way. But what exactly is an atmospheric river?
Rivers in the Sky

Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere – like rivers in the sky – that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics. These columns of vapor move with the weather, carrying an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow…
California faces weeks of cleanup as “one last” major storm lashes state – Axios

California was lashed by the final in a series of lethal atmospheric rivers Monday night — as officials warned it could take weeks to clean up the sustained heavy rains, snow and floods that’ve hit the state.
The latest: A mandatory evacuation order was issued for a flooded mobile home park in Acampo after 175 residents left voluntarily earlier Monday, per the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office…