Flying through an Atmospheric River and a Bomb Cyclone

A moment of awe while journeying home to Southern California from Portland

What you see in this photo are actually swirling “fingers” of clouds somewhere over California. I’m not exactly sure where we were because all of the markers — mountain ranges, lakes, and stretches of desert and coastline — that I am so used to seeing on the flight from Portland, Oregon, where my sister lives, to Orange County, California were completely obliterated by the whiteness blanketing the atmosphere on this Sunday’s flight.

At lunch, before we headed to the airport, in Portland, we watched through the glass windows of Biscuits’ Cafe as the storm blew in. It had rained all night. Actually it had rained for most of the weekend. But, now, it was pouring sideways. It was like a sheen of liquid glass was bouncing at an angle off the sloped rooftop across the parking lot. And those colored leaves, the ones I had been so excited to see, were now fluttering in little multi-colored tornadoes everywhere before melting into moldering puddles on the sidewalks.

I distinctly remember the first time I read about “Atmospheric Rivers” in Scientific American, about eight years ago. I had been writing my master’s thesis, which was about interconnection and about how the things that we cannot see affect us. It struck me as being so bizarre that it has only been a very recent realization that these monstrously large bodies of water have been flowing above us and we’ve never known it.

A mile up above our heads, stretching two-hundred and fifty miles across and thousands of miles long, roils a river — a river suspended in the air. Called an “Atmospheric River,” this stream of vapor carries as much water as ten to fifteen Mississippi Rivers, conveying the moisture from the tropics to the middle latitudes.

Once the water reaches the coastal mountains of the U.S. West Coast, the water cools and condenses into torrential rain or snow storms. As many as nine of these rivers hit the California Coast each year. But we are not alone, these “Rivers in the Air” flow all across the globe.

In 1998, researchers Yong Zhu and Reginald Newell, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noticed that, outside of the tropics, about “ninety-five percent of all vapor transport toward the poles occurred in just five or six narrow bands, distributed somewhat randomly around the globe, that moved east to west across the middle latitudes.” And, about the same time, new satellite technology allowed scientists to see these tentacles of vapor snaking their way across the tropics towards cooler regions.

But the crazy thing, is that we never knew these massive rivers were there. We didn’t know to look for them, and so we never saw them.

We had a rough take-off out of Portland on Sunday, as bumpy as a roller coaster, and then found ourselves suspended in a sea of whiteness. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in India, where it is pretty common in the winter to fly “blind” through dense fog. Those flights have always been a bit terrifying to me.

But I don’t recall experiencing a flight like that here, in the United States — until Sunday, that is. We hit our cruising altitude and were completely “socked in” for most of the two-and-a-half hour flight.

The whole west coast of the Americas was assaulted this past Sunday and Monday by a storm — fueled by an atmospheric river — which had undergone bombogenesis, or the process in which a storm system undergoes rapid strengthening in a 24-hour period. The storm’s lowest pressure was 942 millibars, or 27.82 inches of mercury, which is lower pressure than some tropical cyclones in the Atlantic this hurricane season. The ferocious storm produced wave heights off the coast up to 40 feet, according to data from the Ocean Prediction Center.

So I put on my headphones and listened to an audible book, trying not to think too much about the massive “river in the sky” or the edges of the bomb cyclone we were flying through.

Towards the end of the flight, we began to see some sky appear overhead. But underneath us, the world still swirled as if in a ghostly realm.

Eventually, that floor of vapor began to solidify into those swirling arms in the top photo. The incredible power and beauty of it left me in complete awe. If you’ve ever wondered about how small we are and how vast the universe is, all you have to do is to look at grandeur such as this to be certain that Mother Nature is in charge.

We, humans, exist in a world of false and incomplete perceptions, limited by our past experiences and by the lenses of our physical bodies. We did not know to even look for these rivers in the sky until 1998, so we had no idea that they existed. How many other things are out there that we can’t conceptualize because we don’t even know that their existence is a possibility?

Countless teachers over the millennia have spoken of this illusion and also of the need to break free of our own bondage to be able to really “see” with any clarity. And by “seeing,” I’m not just speaking of seeing natural phenomenon. This also applies to all of our relationships with our families, friends, and countless other people living on the other side of the globe.

A text I am fond of, the ancient Śiva-sūtras of Kaśmiri Śaivism tell us that “the great illusion arises from the inability to discriminate between the ordinary perception of objects and the understanding of their true inner qualities.”

This discrimination is the task of mystics, seekers and of all those who wish to make a better world in which to live. We need to be able to look for these rivers above us, to dip a toe into the vast streams of Consciousness in which we all swim, and yet do not normally see. We need to reach beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception and to feel the pulsation of the universe as She breathes with us. We just need to open our eyes to possibility.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

You might have noticed that this piece is published in my new pub, “Butterfly Dreams,” which I created to showcase some of my photos, poems and musings. If you’d like to see more pieces like this, you can “follow” the publication.

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.