The Brief

California is in the midst of a strong atmospheric river that's caused flooding, evacuations, road closures, and mention of it is all over the news and social media. And this comes on the heel of twoprevious winters where the Golden State saw damaging storms of the same kind. If you have the feeling that in the past few years, you've started hearing the term a lot more, you are not alone. You're not even wrong.

In recent years, "atmospheric river" has become used much more frequently in scientific papers and in media coverage. According to experts who study climate and weather, a couple reasons may explain why. Technical weather terms in general are now more used in the news. Atmospheric rivers are a thriving area of research, more of which may be filtering into media coverage. And these storms are also expected to intensify and become more damaging as the climate warms – which means there's more attention on them.

What is an atmospheric river anyway?

Before we get into why we're hearing about them more, let's go over the basics of what an atmospheric river is.

These storms have always existed. They occur around the world, often on the west coasts of the mid-latitudes, where an ocean meets a landmass. They're long filaments of concentrated water vapor in the lower atmosphere occurring along with strong winds – and they're the primary way water is moved horizontally. In California, a normal winter might see five of these kinds of storms and as many as 20 could occur during wet winters. A typical one can be 300 miles wide, a mile deep and 1,000 miles long. When plotted on a map or looked down upon from a satellite in space they looked just like rivers.

For a long time, they were colloquially and scientifically referred to as things like the Pineapple Express or Rum Runner Express. Those turned out to be just a subset of atmospheric rivers however, ones that originated near Hawaii or in the Caribbean heading toward Europe. Not all ARs are particularly warm or begin in those locations.

"So the 'atmospheric river' term is the broader envelope," says Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the University of California.

The term was coined in a 1994 paper by two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"And it turns out that they are very comparable to terrestrial rivers in terms of how much water is moving in them," Swain said. "In fact, sometimes they're significantly greater even than some of the flow of the largest terrestrial rivers on earth," including the Mississippi or Amazon River.

How we talk about the weather has changed

Swain believes that one reason people are suddenly hearing about atmospheric rivers more is because those who communicate about weather to the public have made a shift to using terms that the scientific community uses.

"I think a lot of it probably has to do with the media landscape and the popularization of certain technical weather terms," he said, pointing to "bomb cyclone" and "bombogenesis" as other examples. These are formal, quantitatively defined meteorological terms, "and everyone assumes that's just some invention of the social media hype era."

In fact, he says, these seem to date back to the 1940s during World War II when meteorologists were advising Allied forces in the North Atlantic Theater.

Atmospheric river, he says, is similar.

"Instead of just making something up out of the ether," Swain says, "there's been an interest in what are actually meaningful, technically correct scientific terms to describe various weather phenomena, which I'm not so sure is a bad thing."

Scientists have done a lot to understand atmospheric rivers better

In recent years, ARs have been a blooming area of research, some of which is filteringinto mediacoverage.

Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been a pioneer in the field and is frequently cited in the press.

Researchers like Ralph have helped discover how important atmospheric rivers are, both for California but also for storms around the country and world. Back in 2004, the topic had fallen out of favor, says Ralph. But with new data collected by aircraft and satellites he showed researchers how to see the storms in a new way, allowing scientists to observe them from the inside and out.

"I sort of resurrected the topic after an early pullback," Ralph said.

This now-vibrant area of research has made some recent discoveries, says Ralph, including how to better predict their effects, how they impact both snowfall and snowmelt in the polar regions and links between AR intensity and climate change.

"Because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor and water vapor is the fuel in atmospheric rivers, ARs can carry more water vapor," Ralph says. "And there are studies now that show we can expect to see somewhat more extreme ARs and more common, in some cases, just because of that."

The weather news in California has flipped from being about drought to being about storms

What may increase the impression that atmospheric rivers are a new thing is that for a good part of the past decade, California was in serious drought and wasn't getting them. Then in early 2023, multiple AR storms followed one after another, resulting in flooding around California and 22 deaths.

"In both cases, it's a story about atmospheric rivers, in one case a deficit of atmospheric rivers, not enough of them, and the other case overabundance – too many atmospheric rivers all at once," said Swain. "California water lives and dies by this."

Atmospheric rivers are at fault in more than 80 percent of flooding across the West. On average these storms cause $1 billion in damage each year.

A look at Google Trends, reveals an early blip of interest in atmospheric rivers in early 2011, hardly anything during the drought years of 2012-2016, then more blips in 2017, 2019 and 2021 coinciding with West Coast storms and flooding. And finally large spikes in interest in 2023 and 2024. So far this fall has only brought one AR to California, but it is a record-breaking one.

A major development for the future of atmospheric river research, says Ralph, is the possibility of improving our forecasting up to two weeks before a storm.

Legislation introduced on Wednesday by Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) seeks to secure funding to increase airborne reconnaissance – using planes to fly through the storms – to learn more about atmospheric rivers.

"The more we sample these storms, the more accurate the forecasts become," said Ralph.

Felt around the country

Lest you think these storms are purely a West Coast phenomenon, researchers are increasingly appreciating ARs role in fueling and directing nor'easters, strong storms that impact the East Coast.

"It's quite possible that AR recon in the Gulf of Mexico and off the East Coast will actually be able to improve the forecast scale of the track and intensity of nor'easters," Ralph said, "which people in the East know full well, is a very important detail in order to determine if the big cities are impacted."

NPR audiences first heard about atmospheric rivers in 2013, when Jon Hamilton offered "Tips for Surviving a Mega Disaster."

Long Beach is inching closer to a deadline when they’ll have to kick hundreds of formerly homeless people off of a federal housing assistance program. On Wednesday, a top homelessness official estimated 375 households will lose their benefits as of October, leaving them at risk of sliding back into homelessness.

The deadline is looming after Congress decided against authorizing new funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Emergency Housing Voucher program.

The pandemic-era program, launched in 2021, distributed about 70,000 Emergency Housing Vouchers — or EHVs — across the country. Long Beach received 582, and originally expected them to run through 2030, but local officials say rising rent costs drained the funding more quickly than anticipated.

When funding runs dry, Long Beach will be forced to end EHVs for the 500 local households that still rely on them, according to Homeless Services Bureau Manager Paul Duncan, who gave an update on the program Wednesday at the city’s Homeless Services Advisory Committee meeting. Duncan said 125 households will be given a new type of HUD voucher meant to ease the shock of losing EHVs, but that leaves 375 in the lurch.

How will Long Beach pick who gets kicked off?

“That’s a bigger question at this moment that we have not gotten to,” Duncan said.

For now, all EHV recipients have been moved to the top of the waiting list for Housing Choice Voucher, commonly called Section 8, but there’s no guarantee they’ll receive one before the deadline.

Duncan said the city plans to give recipients at least 60 days’ notice before their rental assistance runs out.

This has left many EHV recipients in limbo, including a single mom named Wiley who showed up to the meeting where Duncan was speaking.

Wiley is a single mother who has been using an Emergency Housing Voucher since January 2023. She’s studying at LBCC and has an internship to become a radiology technologist in Long Beach on Wednesday, April 2, 2026.

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Wiley, who declined to give her last name out of fear that speaking with the media could hurt her chances of receiving a new voucher, said her EHV has been instrumental in keeping her in stable housing.

She was laid off from her health care job shortly after getting her voucher. The rental assistance she receives — 30% of her $2,000 rent — helped her save enough money to sign up for classes at Long Beach City College. She’s nearing the end of an internship to become a radiology technologist, a job that specializes in conducting X-Rays on patients.

For months, while juggling a full class load and a 24-hour-per-week internship, Wiley has been emailing “all kinds of city, state [and] federal representatives” hoping to get a straight answer on what will happen when funding runs out for EHVs.

After Wednesday’s meeting, she left without a clear picture of how she will be affected.

When the biggest band in the world was getting back together to make a new album after a nearly four-year hiatus, what made them choose Los Angeles?

“In terms of having space to be creative,” BTS vocalist V says in the Netflix documentary BTS: The Return. “L.A.’s kind of like an amusement park.”

Rapper RM adds: “L.A. gives us space to experiment — different energy from what we’ve done before.”

“I think you can really settle into the creative process [here better] rather than maybe other cities like New York or London,” BTS: The Return director Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night in Pop, Be Water) told LAist.

“There's a certain, for lack of a better term, ‘chill’ that helps allow you to be creative,” Nguyen added. “Walking outside and seeing the sun and just feeling that experience, I think you can really let ideas marinate, while in some other cities it feels like a pressure cooker at times.”

(L-R) Jimin, j-hope, Suga, and Jin in "BTS: The Return."

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The documentary chronicles the weeks the band members spent in L.A. in the summer of 2025, living together again for the first time in many years — after some members completed mandatory military service and others pursued solo projects — writing and recording their new album Arirang at Conway Studios (host to artists ranging from U2 to Kendrick Lamar).

They also made time to do some very L.A. things — like watching the sunset on the beach in Santa Monica, sitting in traffic (stars, they’re just like us!), eating In-N-Out and going to a Dodger game (or actually, the not-so-relatable experience of going to a game to throw the ceremonial first pitch).

Here are some highlights from Nguyen’s interview with LAist about the making of BTS: The Return, condensed and edited for clarity.

How a 2021 BTS concert at SoFi helped inspire the doc

Bao Nguyen:   I was supposed to go see them at their Rose Bowl show but, because of the pandemic, that was canceled. But they had a run of SoFi shows in 2021 [their first in person since 2019] before they left for the military. I was lucky enough to get tickets to one of those shows, and it was an experience that really changed my mind about BTS and sort of their cultural importance. 

I love going to live concerts, but to go to a BTS concert was definitely the loudest thing I've ever been to — in the best way possible. Just the connection that they had with the fans and how the fans knew every lyric, even in Korean, was so astonishing to me.

And they have these sort of long dialogues with their fans, and they're able to create such intimacy in this massive stadium. 

[Then at their 2022 farewell concert in Busan] they were talking about their upcoming military service, and you could tell that the crowd was getting very emotional as well as the band. And for me, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, I immediately thought of The Odyssey. Like, "Oh, BTS is sort of like Odysseus about to go into the military. And ARMY [the acronym for the band’s fandom, “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”] is like Penelope, longing for the return of their heroes, in many ways."

I pitched this idea to the label and they were somewhat interested at first. I think it was a bit too philosophical maybe for the type of documentaries that BTS has done in the past, but once the group came out of military service, the label contacted me again and said, "Would you be interested now in doing a film about them?" And I jumped at the opportunity.

The origins of ‘Arirang’

In the documentary, the executive creative director of Big Hit Music, BTS’s label, pitches the band the idea of taking inspiration from another group of young Korean men, 19th Century international students at Howard University, who sang what would become the first known recordings of Korean music in the world in 1896 — including the well-known Korean folk song “Arirang,” which dates back to the 13th Century.

What didn’t make it into the doc, Nguyen shared, is that the spark of the idea came to Big Hit by way of a friend of his, L.A.-based stylist Jeanne Yang.

Bao Nguyen:  Boyoung Lee, who's their creative director, had sort of developed that idea from a friend of mine, Jeanne Yang, a stylist who actually helped style the group for their photo shoot.

Jeanne approached James Shin at the label about this really fascinating story about the first Korean music recording in America through these seven young men — happened to be seven, coincidentally — going to Howard University.

So there were just natural connections, and I think that ignited the group’s creativity — like, "OK, ‘Arirang’ can be sort of this framework and anchor for the entire album."

And you can see through the film, how they sort of navigate and negotiate that. It's interesting because each of the seven members have different opinions on it. So it's not a monolith. But I think the spark came from the label, and then, as with any artistic collaboration, it's a conversation with a lot of different people to get the final piece of art.

Other ways that L.A. shaped the film (and how they pulled off that beach scene)

Nguyen said he knew he didn’t want to record formal sit-down interviews with the band members for the documentary in an effort to have the film to “live in the present moment as much as possible,” but found that he naturally ended up finding quiet moments with each of them during their chauffeured commutes to the studio each day.

Bao Nguyen:  I love being in my car because I love the quiet time and reflection I can get sitting in traffic, or hopefully in motion.

So at first I was thinking these car rides would just be these pensive and reflective moments, not even capturing them talking at all. 

But it was when the members were in the car that they just started talking and they just wanted to get things off their chest. It was a really unique perspective into what they were thinking because, for the most part, they're surrounded by people all day, but in the car, they're by themselves and they can really think and talk about what they want to achieve that day, or coming back home, they can talk about what happened.

So I used the routine habit of driving in L.A. and tried to make it as cinematic and meaningful to the story as possible.

\(L-R) j-hope, Suga, Jin, RM, Jung Kook, and Jimin in 'BTS: THE RETURN.'

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The technique of giving the band members their own camcorders to capture footage themselves, Nguyen said, partially came about because of a desire to capture their experiences of life outside of the studio without drawing too much attention with a camera crew.

The one scene where the band was recorded by the documentary crew out in public in L.A. (that wasn’t a controlled public-facing event like at the Dodgers), was a day they spent at a house on the beach in Santa Monica, and ventured out with chairs to watch the sunset and play soccer.

Bao Nguyen:  The beach scene was interesting because I wasn't sure if we were gonna have sort of a "Beatlemania" moment, but kudos to our production team who really planned it well. We found a very quiet part of the beach, we checked it the week before at that time to find out how quiet it stays.

There were people just sort of stationed at different corners of the beach to make sure nothing went crazy. … And luckily, another benefit of shooting in Los Angeles is that people kind of mind their own business. If they're at the beach, they just want to be at the beach. 

There were some people who kind of got a hint that something was going on, I think more because of our cameras, but our producer, Jane Cha Cutler, told people we were just shooting a wedding party or bachelor party video, so people would not think anything was happening.

BTS: The Return is available now on Netflix.

The Artemis II astronauts are making their way back to Earth after the lunar flyby.

The crew became the first astronauts in over 50 years to fly around the far side of the moon. They also experienced a solar eclipse.

During the mission's loop around the moon, the crew took geological observations of places of interest on the lunar surface with their own eyes and snapping thousands of photos of the surface.

The crew will return to Earth on Friday and splash down off the coast of California. NASA says a landing on the lunar surface won't happen until 2028, at the earliest.

Here is what they captured.
Copyright 2026 NPR

April 6: Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby, this image shows the moon fully eclipsing the sun. From the crew's perspective, the moon appears large enough to completely block the sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the sun's outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the moon, but with the moon in darkness, stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity's return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.

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April 6: This is a portion of the moon coming into view along the terminator — the boundary between lunar day and night — where low-angle sunlight casts long, dramatic shadows across the surface. This grazing light accentuates the moon's rugged topography, revealing craters, ridges and basin structures in striking detail. Features along the terminator, such as Jule Crater, Birkhoff Crater, Stebbins Crater and surrounding highlands, stand out.

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April 6: A close-up view from the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II crew's lunar flyby captures a total solar eclipse, with only part of the moon visible in the frame as it fully obscures the sun. Although the full lunar disk extends beyond the image, the sun's faint corona remains visible as a soft halo of light around the moon's edge. From this deep-space vantage point, the moon appeared large enough to sustain nearly 54 minutes of totality, far longer than total solar eclipses typically seen from Earth.

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April 6: Captured from the Orion spacecraft near the end of the Artemis II lunar flyby, this image shows the sun beginning to peek out from behind the moon as the eclipse transitions out of totality. Only a portion of the moon is visible in the frame, its curved edge revealing a bright sliver of sunlight returning after nearly an hour of darkness.

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April 6: This image shows the moon, the near side (the hemisphere we see from Earth) visible at the right side of the disk, identifiable by the dark splotches. At lower left is Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater that straddles the moon's near and far sides. Everything to the left of the crater is the far side.

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April 6: The moon is seen in the window of the Orion spacecraft, in a photo taken by the Artemis II crew, at the end of Day 5 of the journey to the moon.

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April 6: The Orion spacecraft, Earth and the moon are seen from a camera as the Artemis II crew and spacecraft travel farther into space.

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April 6: Artemis II pilot and NASA astronaut Victor Glover peers out one of the Orion spacecraft's windows looking back at Earth ahead of the crew's lunar flyby.

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April 4: Artemis II astronauts (from left) Reid Wiseman, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch and Victor Glover gather for an interview en route to the moon.

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April 4: Astronaut Christina Koch preps for lunar flyby activities after completing aerobic exercise on the flywheel device.

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April 3: An image of Earth taken by astronaut Reid Wiseman inside the Orion capsule.

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April 3: The exterior of the Orion spacecraft Integrity is seen during the Artemis II mission en route to the moon.

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April 3: The Earth seen from a window on the Orion spacecraft Integrity during the Artemis II mission en route to the moon.

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April 3: NASA astronaut Christina Koch is illuminated by a screen inside the darkened Orion spacecraft on the third day of the agency's Artemis II mission. To the right of the image's center, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen is seen in profile peering out one of Orion's windows. Lights are turned off to avoid glare on the windows.

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April 2: A view of Earth taken by Wiseman from of the Orion spacecraft's window after completing the translunar injection burn.

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April 2: Mission specialist Christina Koch peers out one of the Orion spacecraft's main cabin windows, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels toward the moon.

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