California's "worse case scenario" - floods of Biblical proportions

At a conference in Sacramento last week, 117 researchers brought together to study flooding risks in California presented a chilling model they say could become a distinct possibility: A winter storm that brings warm South Pacific air over parts of California, creating an "atmospheric river" that could bring 10 feet of rain over 40 days, flooding large tracts of the state and bringing flood water to nearly a quarter of the state's homes...

As sensational as that scenario sounds, researchers say it's based in historical reality: Such storms have hit California before, most notably in 1861 and 1862, when floods turned a 300-mile stretch of the Central Valley into a lake...

"We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the US Geological Survey Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, which created the model with the help of researchers from FEMA and the California Emergency Management Agency...

The article closes by noting that the risks of such a superstorm "increases as climate change takes hold." Ah....