Justin Fox, Columnist

California's Snow Is Turning to Rain

Warming temperatures are creating big problems for the state's water supply.

January 5, 2017 at 7:07 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Drought-weary California is getting soaked this week. Most of the state is already having a wetter-than-normal rainy season, it's been raining and snowing for the past couple of days, and on Saturday and Sunday an "atmospheric river" of precipitation is expected to arrive.

That sounds like great news -- California needs water, right? What it needs even more is snow, though, and that's where this weekend may disappoint. Current forecasts estimate that the snow will move to above 9,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada on Sunday, subjecting all but the state's tallest peaks and ridges to a downpour that will melt a lot of the earlier snowfall and possibly cause extensive flooding.