A new time-lapse video shared on social media shows Tulare Lake, California's ghost lake, disappear after re-forming last year.
A series of atmospheric rivers hit California last year during an abnormally wet winter season and caused the lake to reemerge in the San Joaquin Valley. The original lake was once much larger than Lake Tahoe and was known to be the largest freshwater lake in the West, but it began to dry up in the late 1800s and fully disappeared 80 years ago when water was diverted and the land was repurposed for agricultural uses.
Atmospheric rivers are a "long, narrow region in the atmosphere—like rivers in the sky—that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The lake is known as a "ghost lake" because it occasionally reappears after heavy bouts of rain. A time-lapse video shared on X (formerly Twitter) by weather expert and storm chaser Colin McCarthy shows the lake's growth throughout the year last year after it reappeared in March 2023. The lake begins to slowly decline later that summer, but it remains until early February of this year.
"The rise and fall of California's ghost lake, Tulare Lake. Tulare Lake grew to nearly the size of Lake Tahoe last spring due to massive storms and a record California snowpack before disappearing again this winter," McCarthy posted on X with the time-lapse video. "Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes before vanishing 130 years ago due to the draining of the lake for agriculture and human water use."
California also has experienced an exceptionally wet winter this year, but the local community has conducted "a significant number of improvements" to the area's infrastructure to ensure the lake doesn't reappear in the same manner.
"Currently, the snowpack will not be as extreme this year, and local and state authorities have done a significant number of improvements to our infrastructure to ensure we are better prepared for future events, specifically the water we absorb from the Sierra Nevada snowpack and local dams," a Kings County Sheriff's Office spokesperson previously told Newsweek.
Kings County is right next to the lake. At one point, more than 10 percent of the county was underwater because of the lake.
National Weather Service meteorologist Antoinette Serrato told Newsweek that for the water year that ran from October 2022 to September 2023, the area received more than 15 inches of rain. Since the water year that began in October 2023, the area has received 5.97 inches of rain.
Outside of Kings County, the most recent slew of atmospheric rivers has affected California's lakes and reservoirs significantly. Many of the state's largest reservoirs' water levels have steadily climbed all winter, and one of the reservoirs recently reached capacity.
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