The Palm Springs Fire Department carried out the swift water rescue after flooding in a desert wash in the city. A wash is an area in the desert where water once flowed or that floods during heavy rain or flash flooding.

The famed California ski resort in the Sierra Nevada says it got up to 7.5ft of snow in the recent storms, with more expected later this week.

“WHAT.A.STORM. We thought this photo was fitting for the final Dump Alert of this Mammoth mega-storm which dropped 6 to 7.5 FEET of snow in the last few days,” the resort’s Instagram account stated.

Southern California was taking stock of the damage from heavy rainfall and high winds on Wednesday even as a new atmospheric river made its way onshore.

Today’s downpours were expected to only impact northern areas of the state, giving the south a break – at least until the weekend, the National Weather Service reported.

The parade of atmospheric rivers has caused an abnormal number of lightning strikes in California in recent weeks.

The state typically has one of the lowest annual tallies of lightning strikes in the nation.

National Weather Service meteorologist Robert Baruffaldi told The New York Times that this was because of the lack of humidity in California that means “it’s harder to get the persistent strikes that other parts of the nation see”.

On Tuesday, the storm system parked over the San Francisco Bay area led to five to ten lightning strikes every five minutes, the local CBS channel reported.

Mammoth Mountain ski area was closed on Tuesday because it received too much snowfall, according to reports.

“An incredible 420cm [165 inches] has fallen since Christmas with over 4ft or 120cm in just in the last day alone,” Global News Canada’s Chief Meteorologist Anthony Farnell tweeted. He shared an image of a ski-lift at the resort under a heavy white blanket of fresh powder.

The resort’s official site reported that the mountain will have a staggered reopening on Wednesday. “Expect delays in all lift openings due to extensive avalanche mitigation work,” an alert stated.

Governor Gavin Newsom hinted at a link between California’s extreme weather and the climate crisis during a visit to Santa Cruz county on Tuesday.

The area has been one of the most heavily impacted from the atmospheric river deluging the state.

“The dries are getting a lot drier the last three years, and the wets are getting a lot wetter. This weather whiplash — is that the new reality?” he said, according to NBC News.

California has been in a state of “megadrought” for the past two decades, intensified by the impacts of global heating. The climate crisis is responsible for about 42 per cent of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, according to a UCLA research paper last year. It also noted that it could take several years of high precipitation to overcome the mega-drought.

Tens of thousands of customers remain without power across California as severe storms continued to batter the state.

Some 57,835 homes and businesses were in blackout on Wednesday morning, according to utility tracker poweroutage.us

The most outages are located in Mendocino county, north of San Francisco, along with Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties which includes the city of San Jose and Silicon Valley.

California transport officials were warning people against taking to the roads with more severe weather on the way.

Districts were “strongly advising” the public to avoid travel this week if possible, reported the California Department of Transportation, known as “Caltrans”.

“These storm systems have affected the majority of CA in some shape or form,” the department tweeted, and advised drivers to consult state travel alerts before heading out.

The next severe front will impact northern California and the Pacific Northwest from Wednesday.

It comes after days of heavy rain which left land waterlogged, adding to the risk of mudslides, particularly in the burn scars of wildfires where land is already destabilized. The heavy rain has also led to rapid water rises in rivers and streams across California and portions of far western Nevada.

The system swamping California is known as an “atmospheric river” – or a “river in the sky” – a band of water vapor that forms over the ocean and can be hundreds of miles wide.

Louise Boyle explains how the phenomenon operates and what it means for California.

More evacuations have been ordered in counties as the storm warning remains in Northern California after torrential downpours.

The Stanislaus County officials have ordered immediate evacuations for some residents in the Newman area of the San Joaquin River and east River Road amid warnings of further rains and high winds.

The California fire department has said the storm on Tuesday was different because ‘it stayed much longer’.

“This storm was different from the standpoint that it was here much longer. It was more intense because of the prior storm, the ground was much more saturated, which led to a lot more flooding and a lot more rescues because of the ground saturation,” said Barry Parker, division chief of the Ventura County Fire Department.

The latest Pacific storm unleashed torrential downpours and damaging winds in California, knocking out power and turning city streets into rivers as mudslides cut off highways and entire communities faced evacuation orders.

More than 33 million Californians were threatened by severe weather throughout the day as “heavy to excessive” rainfall was expected across the state.

The storms have killed at least 17 people since the start of the year, California Governor Gavin Newsom said.

Officials encountered the man’s remains in a stored boat on Tuesday morning, and haven’t determine the cause of death.

Morro Bay was pounded by the atmospheric river that has brought storms across California, killing a woman in nearby Avila Beach on Monday when her car was overtaken by flood waters.

Wildfires tearing through the London suburbs. One-third of Pakistan underwater. Drought-linked famine looming for tens of millions of people in East Africa. Billions of dollars in damage from a “500-year” hurricane that smacked into Florida.

The year 2022 brought disaster after disaster across the planet with scientists increasingly able to point to the climate crisis as the root cause.

Here, The Independent looks back at some of the most erratic and devastating events being driven by humanity’s continued reliance on burning fossil fuels:

With the soil already saturated, much of the damage has been concentrated around the city of Santa Barbara, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of Los Angeles, where the steep foothills slope toward the Pacific Ocean.

Several remote spots have reported more than a foot (30 cm) of rain including the San Marcos Pass in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, where more than 17 inches (43 cm) have fallen, according to the NWS.

In the Rancho Oso area of the Santa Ynez Mountains, mud and debris across the roadway isolated about 400 people and 70 horses, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department said on Twitter, posting a photo of a vehicle stuck in the mud. Rescue teams were on the way, spokesperson Scott Safechuck said.

Near the coast, the California Highway Patrol closed U.S. 101, the main highway connecting northern and southern California, with no estimated time on reopening.

On Monday, officials ordered the evacuation of some 25,000 people, including the entire affluent enclave of Montecito near Santa Barbara, due to heightened flood and mudslide risks. The 4,000 people of Planada, a community in Central California, started their Tuesday morning with an order to evacuate their homes by the county sheriff’s office.

The Montecito evacuation zone was among 17 California regions where authorities worry the ongoing torrential downpours could unleash lethal cascades of mud, boulders and other debris in the hillsides.

To the southeast in Ventura County, crews worked overnight to rescue drivers stuck in a three feet of mud flow along State Highway 126, the California Highway Patrol said.

San Francisco may be facing strong rains, but that didn’t stop one business owner in the city’s Financial District from spraying an unhoused perrson with a hose on Monday.

In a clip that later went viral locally, the man can be seen saying, “Move,” as he blasts the individual, who sits on the sidewalk wrapped in blankets.

As the San Francisco Standard reports, the city is short thousands of shelter beds needed to house those on its streets as strong rains pelt the Bay Area.

The intense weather has often proved catastrophic on the ground, causing flooding, downed trees, and mudslides that have killed at least 16 people and left roughly 224,000 people in the state without power, the Washington Post reports.

Despite all the destruction it has caused, will the atmospheric river end California’s historic drought, the worst in state history? Not quite, according to scientists.

Read our full report to understand why.