California likely to see more extreme flooding
By Lauren Sommer, KQED-TV
Californians are in shock that after five years of too little water, the problem now is too much.
All eyes in California have been on Oroville Dam, where a broken spillway forced major evacuations. But the damage from winter storms has gone beyond the dam in the northern part of the state. Downstream, rivers are running high and levees have been breaching.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. He says California is likely to see more extreme flooding with climate change. And the reason is pretty simple. If it’s warmer, storms produce more rain instead of snow.
