This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel. Jeff Bliss is Pacific Watch.

Atmospheric rivers. What is that? Jeff, a very good evening to you. Your prediction several hours

past is now come to a forecast of an atmospheric river. What is that and where is it? Good evening to you.

Good evening, John. Just for a kind of quick background here. An atmospheric river is this narrow

corridor of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere. And, you know, sometimes they call it a tropical

plume or connection or vapor surge or anything like that. But essentially, you're getting this narrow band of rain and a lot of it in that band.

So there's a huge volume of rain coming at once coming over an area.

And typically it's more to the north of Northern California.

But as we've seen in these past few seasons, it's continued to slip downward, southward.

So right now, it's hitting northern California.

They are expecting, they think in some areas record snow up in the mountains.

But sometime probably around, oh, we're thinking maybe, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday,

we'll get some pretty heavy showers that might go into Thursday. Now, that'll be a plus. Some of the areas where they've, you know, got the, they've corralled the fires, but they're not mopped up. That might help out. But they are also very concerned that if it's too heavy in spots, it could loosen, you know, muds, it could loose mud slides and debris slides onto the

areas below, and that would be a second tragedy. That's what they're really trying to avoid.

Jeff, we're most concerned about not one atmospheric river, but several. You mentioned the

possibility. When will they know more about that,

right upon the event itself, or can they predict? I'm unfamiliar with how Pacific Ocean works.

Well, they are pretty spot on when it comes to predicting. So on this case, typically these come

in a series and we've seen in the past few years they have,

they're predicting we're looking at three of them. Now, will each one be as strong or become

stronger in the next? That's harder to say. But the fact that they're coming in, we can see that

from satellite imagery. We know they're lined up and they're going to come in one behind

...