Floods after drought: why El Niño might not revive California

The Golden State has suffered four parched years, but the land could be too dry to absorb heavy rains anticipated this winter

Vast swathes of forest are so brittle and bone-dry that they burn up in an instant. A vicious wildfire, whipped up by hot, arid winds and moving faster than anything in recent memory, consumed tens of thousands of hectares in a matter of hours. Hundreds of homes and at least one person were lost in an inferno that took days to get under control. That's in California's north.

If you drove south on the same day last month, and you would have found darkened skies and heavy sheets of rain pounding the parched earth around Los Angeles. By noon on 15 September, the city had received 63.5mm of rain, that's 10 times the precipitation the area usually gets in the entire month. The city has only seen two other storms like it in the past 150 years.

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