Despite the precipitation, experts are uncertain if these events — and those potentially to come this season — will be enough to compensate for weeks without significant snowfall.  

“We’re heading into a much colder pattern that will be characterized by some weak to moderate storms,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said at a Tuesday webinar.   

“It’s considerably more snow than the recent storms have dropped in the mountains,” he added, noting that each storm could add between 6 to 12 inches. 

Even with this improvement, however, Swain stressed that there is “still going to be well below average snowpack probably by mid-January.” 

While current conditions are slightly tamer than originally anticipated, the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Sacramento branch reported that heavy snow had already fallen in parts of the Sierra Nevada by Wednesday morning.  

The meteorologists forecasted about 10-19 inches of snow at elevations above 4,000 feet in Northern California through Wednesday night, with as much as 2 feet accumulating along the Sierra Nevada’s highest peaks. 

But Wednesday’s weather is just the first in a sequence of storms expected to pummel California over the coming days. 

On the trail of this “fast-moving” burst, NWS Sacramento warned that “another system moving in over the weekend will bring another round of widespread precipitation.”   

NWS Los Angeles, meanwhile, forecasted potential snow over Southwestern California’s higher mountain peaks through Thursday — with possible accumulation at lower elevations over the weekend.  

The series of storms are coming on the heels of a Tuesday announcement from state water officials that snowpack levels are lingering at just 25 percent of to-date seasonal averages.  

California’s Department of Water Resources presented this data at the year’s first “snow survey,” which gauges the amount of water stored in mountain snow and informs statewide supply decisions later in the season.    

Meteorologists had been anticipating wet conditions this winter due to strong prevailing El Niño conditions, which typically bring rainy weather to California’s coast. 

Yet despite the initially discouraging data, state water officials maintained that it’s too early to tell whether it will be a dry or wet season.  

“We often get slow starts to our water year,” Michael Anderson, state climatologist for California Department of Water Resources, said at a Zoom press conference on Tuesday.  

“We’re only about one-third of the way through the big three months, and a lot can change,” Anderson added.  

The presence of El Niño also isn’t necessarily a reliable predicator of precipitation, stressed Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the University of California, Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory.  

Five of the highest snowfall seasons and four of the lowest snowfall seasons in recent history have both been El Niño years, he noted.  

Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Scientists have taken a key step toward designing bacteria that could be capable of sucking up atmospheric carbon dioxide far faster than plants. 

Such organisms could not only help cool the planet, but they could also yield valuable ingredients for pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, according to new research, published recently in Nature Catalysis.   

Big implications: “Our cycle has the potential to become a versatile platform for producing valuable compounds directly from CO2,” lead author Shanshan Luo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, said in a statement.  

• The team used machine learning to design and test a step-by-step “modular approach” that could ultimately allow bacteria to capture carbon dioxide more than 10 times faster than similar enzymes in plants. 
• They managed to run each step in the process isolation inside the hardy bacterium E. coli — long a crucial workhorse of biotechnology. 

New horizons: The discovery of this new metabolic pathway opens up new possibilities for the role of “synthetic biology” in slowing the rate of global heating, the study authors said. 

• Synthetic biology involves reshaping organisms’ DNA for new applications. 
• Unlike the related field of genetic engineering, however, synthetic biology “allows the standardization and automation of the process, making it more precise and faster,” according to a report from consultancy McKinsey. 

Practical pathogen: The star of this show is E. coli, a bacterium whose readiness to propagate on any surface makes it a crucial conscript in the biotech industry — as well as a common source of gastrointestinal illness. 

• Microbiologists have long sought to hijack for human ends the bacterial ability to pull and reshape carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• In particular, the field of “metabolic engineering” has focused on E. coli, according to a 2020 review in Metabolites. 

Holy grail: As part of its life cycle, E. coli also converts the planet-heating gas into acetyl-CoA, a vital biomolecule that cells use in building carbohydrates, fats and proteins. 

If scientists engineered bacteria that could speed up that process dramatically, they could have a ready source of biomolecules for industry – whose processing could also cool the planet. 

Are we there yet? No. The Planck Institute scientists verified that each of the three steps in their process works in isolation. 

But they haven’t yet been able to create an organism that can run through the entire complex cycle on its own, from breathing in carbon dioxide to fabricating acetyl-CoA, Luo said. 

Building blocks: But even partial solutions are beneficial, according to corresponding author Tobias Erb, director of the Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology. 

• The new findings pave the way for “new-to-nature CO2-fixation pathways in cell factories,” Erb said in a statement. 
• “We are learning to completely reprogram the cellular metabolism to create a synthetic [carbon-burning] operating system for the cell,” he added.