Last week, as Californians braced for heavy weather, forecasters found themselves engulfed in a sudden online storm.
“WARNING: Meteorologists are currently debating whether California is about to get hit by something that they’ve been dreading for a long time,” an emergency preparedness enthusiast named Danielle Langlois cautioned on X. “They’re not certain (yet), but it is entirely possible that what is brewing in the Pacific right now heralds the beginning of the dreaded #ARkStorm.”
Ms. Langlois is not a climate scientist or a weather expert. She claims no special knowledge of the “ARkStorm,” a rare atmospheric onslaught modeled by scientists at the United States Geological Survey that would engulf major cities in water. She said later that she is an actor with fewer than 5,000 social media followers, a Californian’s healthy respect for natural disasters and an apartment in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles.
No matter. Over the next several days, her post went viral while the National Weather Service, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and leading climate scientists rushed to quash the gathering fear that a biblical storm was about to swallow California.
“There is absolutely no indication of an extremely severe or catastrophic statewide flood event as has been rumored,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on ARkStorms, stressed in a Friday briefing on YouTube. Four days later, ARkStorm questions still peppered his live feed. When he shared his forecast for this week, a commenter exclaimed, “What the ARK?!?!”