Expect a big surge of news and stories about the science of giant floods. I don't mean the bad news from Brazil, Australia and Sri Lanka. But those catastrophes are a perfect springboard for the U.S. disaster exercise called ARkStorm, a Noachian scenario involving a solid month of rainstorms in California. It's based on history: in the winter wet season of 1861-62, rain fell for 45 straight days and more than a million hectares of the Central Valley became a lake. Extreme events like this are commonly linked to atmospheric rivers, long wind streams that funnel concentrated moisture across the globe. The ARkStorm team is having a meeting this week to prepare for a statewide exercise in April. If you're interested, watch the video, dig into the science and follow the ARkStorm Facebook page (and keep checking arkstorm.org, too, I would think). The name, with its biblical echo, comes from the idea of setting the 1861-62 atmospheric river (AR) scenario at an index value of 1000 (k), a real "kilo" storm or "killstorm."
And right on time, the USGS has released the ARkStorm scenario as Open-File Report 2010-1312.
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