Tired of living through weather history yet? It’s relentless.. and becoming so common it just stops feeling historic and instead just awful and redundant ..
Hurricane Hilary has intensified into a Category 4 storm as it nears Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, yet is expected to weaken over the weekend as it brings rain and the threat of flooding to parts of the Southwest US.
Some are worried that it could hit a cat 5 before weakening ..
Hilary was churning about 425 miles south of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, early Friday morning with sustained winds of 140 mph with stronger gusts, the National Hurricane Center said.
The updated wind cone (featured as this story’s main image) has an increased chance of tropical storm-strength winds hitting the San Diego area, up from 30%-40% to 40%-50%.
There is also an outside chance of what’s known as a “wet” Santa Ana event, which could bring increased winds, as the circulation pushes north.
More..
Thanks to Hilary, “multiple years’ worth of precipitation could potentially fall in some of the driest parts of California,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said Wednesday.
Among those spots is Death Valley, California, the hottest place on Earth. Death Valley typically receives about 2 inches of rain across an entire year, according to NWS data. Moisture from Hilary could unleash enough rain to give Death Valley 1 to 2 years worth of rainfall in a single day. And Las Vegas could get 2 to 4 inches of rain. It only averages 3.75 inches of rain a year.
Prolonged rain may oversaturate the ground and overwhelm waterways, potentially worsening the flood threat.