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    Scenes From the Atmospheric River That Drenched California and the Pacific Northwest

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    A gusty, rain-soaked storm swept through the Pacific Northwest and Northern California this week, killing at least three people and knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of customers.The dangerous weather, fueled by the season’s first major atmospheric river from the Pacific Ocean, battered the region starting on Tuesday. Forceful winds wiped out power for half a million customers in Washington. Among the places hardest hit was the Seattle area, where falling trees killed two people. The storm then moved into Northern California, where it disrupted hundreds of flights, flooded creeks, drenched San Francisco and brought heavy snow to parts of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. On Saturday, a body was recovered in floodwaters in Sonoma County, local authorities said. Though the storm is weakening as it inches south, residents are still reeling from the damage. More than 90,000 customers in Washington were still without power on Saturday morning, along with about 17,000 in California. In the region north of San Francisco, which includes Napa Valley, flooding is expected to continue through Saturday.Here are photos of the storm’s toll this week.Saturday, Nov. 23Hale Irwin/Sipa, via Associated PressCars drive on a snowy highway over Donner Summit in California.ReutersWater rescue teams deployed in Forestville, Calif.Friday, Nov. 22Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesA cyclist rides through a flooded intersection in San Francisco.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesFog rolled in around the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.ReutersFlooding in Santa Rosa caused road closures and detours.Rachel Bujalski for The New York TimesSome streets were flooded in Rohnert Park, Calif.Rachel Bujalski for The New York TimesStaci Harpole looks over a flooded vineyard off Wohler Road in Forestville.Noah Berger/Associated PressA mudslide near a home in Sonoma County, Calif.Rachel Bujalski for The New York TimesFlooding in Santa Rosa, Calif.Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated PressLivestock graze on a patch of grass surrounded by the swollen Eel River in Ferndale, Calif.Thursday, Nov. 21Mason Trinca for The New York TimesA giant tree fell on Front Street in Crescent City, Calif.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesPolice officers help a woman walk through a flooded parking lot in Santa Rosa.ReutersRoads and vineyards were flooded in Sebastopol, Calif.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesPolice officers wave to a car trying to drive through a flooded parking lot in Santa Rosa.KOMO via Associated PressEmergency crews responded to a downed tree in Issaquah, Wash.Wednesday, Nov. 20David Ryder/ReutersResidents survey storm damage in Seattle.Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty ImagesTara Brown surveys storm damage while walking her dog in Lake Stevens, Wash.Noah Berger/Associated PressUtility workers tend to downed power lines in Sonoma County.Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty ImagesTiffani Palpong stands in front of her property in Lake Stevens where her son was trapped by downed power lines and trees.Noah Berger/Associated PressIsabella Karamitsos, a U.S. Geological Survey employee, deploys a sensor to measure water flow in Santa Rosa.Kate Selig More

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      Wildfire Grows in New Jersey and New York, Despite Modest Rainfall

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      The Jennings Creek fire is currently burning across 3,500 acres, officials said, and is expected to grow to over 5,000 acres.A wildfire consuming a vast stretch of hilly forest along the New York-New Jersey border continued to grow on Monday despite the first significant rainfall in nearly six weeks, fire officials said. Bone-dry weather and gusts of up to 40 miles per hour are expected to sweep through the region on Tuesday, raising the risk that the fire will continue to spread.More than 3,500 acres were burning in New Jersey and New York as of Monday night, and the fire was expected to grow to more than 5,000 acres, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said.About 20 percent of the New Jersey portion of the fire was contained, according to the state’s Forest Fire Service. It was not clear how much of the New York portion of the fire was contained.The rain on Sunday night, measuring just a quarter of an inch across the region, only temporarily slowed the fire’s growth, said Christopher Franek, an assistant division fire warden for the Forest Fire Service.“We’re throwing everything we’ve got at it,” he said. “A lot of manual labor is choking on smoke and dust.” Five thousand acres is nearly eight square miles — about a third the size of Manhattan.Hundreds of firefighters from dozens of fire departments in both states are battling the blaze in a rugged patch of Passaic County in New Jersey and Orange County in New York near the Appalachian Trail.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After California Mountain Fire, Residents Return to Find Homes Reduced to Rubble

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      The Mountain fire has torn through more than 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 130 structures in Ventura County. “It’s just devastating,” one resident said.In the city of Camarillo, Calif., on Old Coach Drive, the smell of smoke lay heavy in the air. The fire that erupted this week had hopscotched around the neighborhood, leaving some homes relatively unscathed but reducing several to charred piles of wood and rubble.Kathleen Scott and her sister Tonia Wall surveyed what was left of their two-bedroom home: layers of ash and the metal outlines of what was once the washing machine and dryer.Bent over the earth where a bedroom would have been, the two used a small garden spade to dig through the remains. They hoped they might find some mementos belonging to Ms. Scott’s daughter, Jacquelyn, who died from a rare neurological condition at age 4.“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Ms. Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Kathleen Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”Loren Elliott for The New York TimesMs. Scott holding some salvaged keepsakes that she found on her destroyed property.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 Temperatures Are on Track for a Record High, Researchers Find

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      The new report also says that global warming has hit a threshold, at least temporarily, that countries had pledged to avoid.This year will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, beating the high set in 2023, researchers announced on Wednesday.The assessment, by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that monitors global warming, also forecast that 2024 would be the first calendar year in which global temperatures consistently rose 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s the temperature threshold that countries agreed, in the Paris Agreement, that the planet should avoid crossing. Beyond that amount of warming, scientists say, the Earth will face irreversible damage.Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating up the planet, imperiling biodiversity, increasing sea level rise and making extreme weather events more common and more destructive.“These type of events will get worse and they will get more frequent,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus. Recent storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the flooding in Spain demonstrate just how devastating weather intensified by warming can be.Still, it’s important to note that a single year above 1.5 degrees Celsius does not mean the Paris Agreement target has been missed.Under the terms of the pact, for that to happen, temperatures would have to stay at or above 1.5 degrees over a 20-year period. Each year has natural variability, so one year that’s warmer or cooler is not as important as the general trend of warming. It’s that signal, the steady crawl of record hot year after record hot year, that has alarmed experts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amid Flood Cleanup in Spain, Residents Try to Make Sense of the Disaster

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      Some see the floods as an example of the effect of a changing climate that is making overwhelming downpours more common. Locals also say government warnings came too late.Mari Luz Sánchez’s body lay on top of an overturned refrigerator in a corner of her kitchen when her family found her. A wave of water in the village of Chiva, in southeastern Spain, had deposited her there after devastating flooding across the region on Tuesday night.“The torrent of water took her away,” said Ms. Sánchez’s daughter-in-law, Pilar Zahonero. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”Never had locals in Chiva seen their streets turn into such furious surges of muddy water that tore through their homes. Not in the 1983 floods, nor in the ones in 2019, had waves over six feet high trapped people inside their cars and homes and taken so many lives.“I’d never seen rain like this,” said Concepción Feijoo Martínez, 66, as she stood in her house in Chiva, which had been torn open on one side by the rushing waters let loose when a nearby river overflowed its banks.“They say there is no climate change,” she added. “Then what is this atrocity?”Residents cleaning a mud-covered house in Chiva on Thursday. Locals have never seen their streets turn into such furious surges of muddy water that tore through their homes.Kai Forsterling/EPA, via ShutterstockDays after their country’s deadliest natural catastrophe in recent decades, as they swept mud off their floors and mourned their dead, Spaniards started to try to make sense of the tragedy that had struck them: Why were the floods on such an enormous scale, and why did so many die?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Autumn in New York Has Been the One of the City’s Driest Ever

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      It’s been 29 days since Central Park has seen measurable rain.On Saturday, Sarah Antebi, a 19-year-old sophomore at Barnard and Columbia, paused for a moment while running through Central Park to take in the fall foliage at the lake. It’s unusually resplendent for this time of year, with many of the trees just starting to turn orange and yellow.Like many New Yorkers, she was torn between enjoying the sight and feeling a sense of unease at how unusually warm and dry autumn has felt this year.“All my friends are like, ‘We just want it to be fall,’” she said. “We just want to wear our sweaters.”October is historically a fairly dry month, but the city has never quite seen an October like this. As of Tuesday morning, Central Park had gone 29 days without measurable rain, the second-longest dry streak in records that date back to 1869, Bill Goodman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New York confirmed. If no rain falls before midnight on Halloween, October would be the driest calendar month in the city’s history.And if the city makes it all the way through Election Day without measurable rain — something forecasts suggest is likely — it will beat the current record for a dry streak: 36 days, set in October and November 1924.(For rain to be considered measurable, the rain gauge at Belvedere Castle in Central Park must detect one-hundredth of an inch or more. The last time it did that was Sept. 29, when 0.78 of an inch fell.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fire in Oakland Hills Prompts Evacuations Under Gusty Conditions

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      Firefighters in Northern California were responding to a blaze that burned two homes and 15 acres.A brush fire erupted in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, forcing the evacuation of hillside neighborhoods and the brief closure of a major highway as high winds threatened to spread the blaze.The five-alarm fire, which officials have named the Keller fire, had burned about 15 acres and damaged two homes in an Oakland Hills area, the Oakland Fire Department said. It came one day before the 33rd anniversary of the 1991 Tunnel fire, which killed 25 people and destroyed 3,000 homes several miles north of the current blaze.More than two hours after the fire was first reported, officials began to express confidence that they were getting a handle on the situation. There were no reports of injuries, and Oakland Fire Department officials said that the forward progress of the wind-driven fire had been stopped.Images shared by fire officials showed aircraft flying through billowing smoke, dousing the hillside below as a fire engine fixed its hose on a home.“If air resources don’t get here as quickly as they did, we might have a different report right now,” Damon Covington, the Oakland fire chief, said at a news conference.The area has some of the East Bay’s most desirable homes, with those near the top of the Oakland Hills peering over the San Francisco Bay with views of city skylines. But the 1991 blaze also looms in the memories of longtime residents as a deadly threat, especially in an era of climate change that has included some of the most destructive wildfires in California history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Officials and Residents Credit Hurricane Milton Warnings With Saving Lives

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      As Hurricane Milton churned in the Gulf of Mexico and moved toward Florida this week, the warnings from officials were dire.Gov. Ron DeSantis warned people who intended to ride out the storm in coastal areas that “Mother Nature is going to win that fight.” Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa told residents “you are going to die” if they did not evacuate. The National Weather Service said the hurricane could be the worst to hit the Tampa Bay region in more than a century.On Thursday, as Hurricane Milton moved offshore into the Atlantic Ocean, officials and residents credited those warnings for getting people out of harm’s way. “We know lifesaving measures did make a difference,” President Biden said.“We know lifesaving measures did make a difference,” President Biden said at the White House on Thursday.Tierney L. Cross for The New York TimesWhile waiting for a bridge to open and allow traffic back into Fort Myers Beach on Thursday, Jacki Liszak, the president of the town’s Chamber of Commerce, said she was focused not on the triple-whammy punch of Hurricanes Ian, Helene and Milton, but instead on what had gone right during this latest storm.“When I write the script to this movie, nobody is going to believe it,” she said. “It’s insanity. But we’re going to take this as a win.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Milton’s Storm Surge Threatens Dangerous Flooding in Florida

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      Storm surge along the western Florida coast began to pick up as daylight dwindled and Hurricane Milton came ashore with its heavy rains and damaging winds, bringing the threat of major flooding.Flood gauges showed rapidly rising water levels on the coast at Fort Myers and Naples Bay shortly after Milton’s center arrived on land near Sarasota. Forecasters warned of the life threatening surge, which was expected to reach up to 13 feet in some areas, like Boca Grande on the far edges of the western coast.The term storm surge describes the dramatic, higher-than-expected rise in water levels brought on by a storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.“The combination of a dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline,” forecasters had earlier warned.In Tampa Bay, officials issued a flash flood emergency, a rare alert used when flooding is expected to inflict catastrophic damage and pose a severe threat to human life.Storm surge has been a particular point of emphasis with this hurricane among officials as it’s been responsible for dozens of deaths in storms past. In 2022, for example, 41 deaths during Hurricane Ian were attributed to storm surge.Images on social media taken before Milton’s arrival showed signs of the deluge to come, with water beginning to lap over sidewalks and roadways. Some videos showed the light from buildings reflecting brightly off the water against the darkness of night as it rushed over streets and into buildings. More