to talk more about the storms in california, we are joined by daniel swain, a climate scientist at uclaf "weather west, the california weather blog." he is also a research fellow at the national center for atmospheric research and at the nature conservancy. daniel, welcome back to democracy now! can you talk about what is happening in california right now and how it links to climate change? >> thank you for having me. you mentioned in the introduction, california has been expensing a multiweek period of very heavy precipitation, really a sequence of strong storm events, some of which have been what are known as atmospheric rivers, which are these corridors of highly conctrat wateraporoving ickly throh the atsphere. so california s been expensing it for multie weeksut the t rest of multiple storms over the past several weeks has been to produce pretty significant flooding impacts in certain parts of california that have unfortunately turned deadly nermeen: nermeen:. could you talk about the way in which these storms, these extreme weather events are being interpreted and how it is possib

, and i love that used the term weather whiplash, couple of years back, we were writing paper, daniel swain at ucla my group and alex hall at ucla were looking for a term that would convey the switch between extremes, at that time we moved from a drought to a situation where the hole down had a major spill way incident in large rain, and whiplash seemed to be the right term to capture how strong this switch between extremes is. so not everywhere we'll get the same amount of whiplash, if you are further north in seattle, for instance, the increases in rain tend to prominent the droughts you know, the tendency to drought is there not as bad as in california. if you go down to mexico, central america, the tendency to drought can be even stronger in that region, so it will vary from one place to another in the world. but the basic thing warmer temperatures more water vapor greater swings between strong rains and longer periods between them, stronger i vantage point representation, that will be quite widespread in many parts of the world . >> i appreciate your analysis, jay david neelin, thanks

. >>> and joining me to talk more about this event is daniel swain, a climate scientist at ucla. iel, great to see you again. look, i'm from out west as well. people in california are just not used to these kinds of deluges. you say that's not what's -- not ordinary. it's the back-to-back nature of these storms, correct? >> that's right. while some of the storms are moderate to strong, the problem is the fact that they are coming back to back to back in quick sequence and not really giving the land a chance to dry out in between. so the flood risk is cumulative and even though the upcoming storms won't necessarily be stronger than previously in the same sequence, the flood impacts are likely to much worse. >> why are we seeing this amount of precipitation? >> well, that's a good question. right now there is a very strong jet stream really extending all the way across the north pacific ocean ending right near california. and that's essentially a storm delivery mechanism for the west coast and right now it's aimed squarely at california. this pattern has been in place since the last

daniel swain, a climate scientist at ucla, explained what it is. daniel: it's a bunch of water vapor moving fast above your head. and, really, it's a large volume of water. we're talking about many times the volume of the mississippi river, for example, in the form of water vapor in the air. most of california's water systems can reasonably handle even very intense one-off storms, but when you start to see long sequences over days and weeks of repeated moderate-to-intense storms like this and atmospheric rivers bringi copious precipitation, the cumulative effect over days and weeks becomes much more difficult to manage. stephanie: forecasters have warned this new storm could bring as much as four more inches of rain to northern california, coupled with wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour. swain said the frequency of major storms on the west coast is just one of the many mixe effects of climate change. daniel: our own research published earlier this year suggested that climate change has already doubled the risk of a prolonged and extremely severe