January 5, 2023 - Flooding in California

Flooding
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Heavy rain hit parts of central and northern California on New Year’s
Eve 2022, flooding communities near San Francisco and Sacramento. Water
breached levees along the Cosumnes River near Wilton, California,
flooding numerous roads including Highway 99—a major thoroughfare in
the Central Valley. Wilton and other nearby farming communities were
issued evacuation orders.

The Bay Area National Weather Service measured 5.5 inches (14
centimeters) of rain in downtown San Francisco on December 31, 2022,
the second wettest day in more than 170 years of record-keeping. This
daily total is about half of the city’s expected rainfall for the
entire month of December. Toward the northeast in Sacramento County,
some areas recorded up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain within 24
hours, according to the National Weather Service.

The flooding that ensued is visible in the false-color image (top)
acquired on January 1, 2023, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Water appears
light to dark blue. Vegetation is green and bare land is brown. For
comparison, the Terra MODIS image acquired on November 19, 2022 (lower
image) shows the same area prior to the intense rainfall.

Near Wilton, levees of the Cosumnes River have been breached. The
Sacramento County Office of Emergency Services urged residents of
Wilton, California, to evacuate on December 31, 2022, but changed the
order a few hours later to shelter-in-place due to treacherous road
conditions in the area. As flooding moved southwest along the Cosumnes
River on January 1, residents of Point Pleasant were ordered to leave
their homes and move livestock.

Emergency personnel rescued people from roofs of cars, and several
people in Wilton were stranded in their homes. Hundreds of people in
Sacramento County were still without power as of the morning of January
3, 2023. Crews of the Cosumnes River Levee District scrambled to fix
the levee breaches as another major winter storm approached North
Central California.

On January 4, California Governor Gavin Newsome declared a state of
emergency just ahead of the arrival of howling winds and drenching rain
later that day. Dozens of flights have been cancelled at the San
Francisco International Airport, while some schools in that city
cancelled schools for January 5, based on the expectation of extremely
difficult conditions. The Director of the California Governor’s Office
of Emergency Services was quoted as describing the current storm, which
began on the afternoon of January 4 and is expected to last at least
through January 5 with these words: “We anticipate that this may be one
of the most challenging and impactful series of storms to touch down in
California in the last five years.”

Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 1/1/23
Resolutions: 1km (86.4 KB), 500m (200.4 KB), 250m (477 KB)
Bands Used: 7.2.1
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC



https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2023-01-05

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