El Niño Floods California's Coast—and the Year's Highest Tides Haven't Even Arrived
El Niño Is Flooding California's Coasts with the Highest Tides to Come
High tides already turned Marin County's Shoreline Highway into two-foot-deep pools, and San Francisco Bay set an October record this week—from ordinary spring tides alone. USGS oceanographer Sean Vitousek warns that king tides plus winter storms will "definitely" bring worse. UC Davis's Fraser Shilling estimates once-in-a-century surges 2 to 3 feet above current levels could cost $1.5 million a day along Route 37, and saltwater threatens EV battery fires.
We face the risk—though not the certainty—of catastrophic flooding in a variety of coastal towns this winter.
- skyberrys
The tides are really high right now. It's very obvious that the water is much higher than usual. Can't wait until it starts raining on me more than usual too... I'll have extra water from both directions.
- xiaoyu2006
I am in OC and newport beach really suffered...
- mlsu
I am an oceangoing person in Socal.
This El Nino phenomena is caused by something called Bjerknes feedback. There is a recurring atmospheric 'wave' of relaxed and enhanced trade winds, called the Madden-Julien oscillation (the MJO) that travels slowly west to east across the planet with a period of approximately 60 days. The "active" phase of the MJO usually comes with a burst of westerly (west-to-east) winds in the west pacific. Those slow down the normally easterly (east-to-west) trades a bit. Some years, those easterly trades are slowed down a bit more than usual; this causes the heated up water in the western pacific to 'escape containment': deep warm water moves west to east, in a Kelvin wave. A strong series of these Kelvin waves can cause a mass of deep warm water to build in the eastern pacific. Upwelling there now brings warm water to the surface, instead of cold water, which means the air above the east pacific gets hotter, which means it rises -- low pressure -- which causes the trades to slacken further (-> the air moves relatively in a westerly direction to take up this low pressure), which causes another, stronger Kelvin wave, and so on and so on. This is Bjerknes feedback; it causes El Nino.
These Kelvin waves stop when they hit South America and split: half moves S->N along the N hemi coast, half moves N->S along the S hemi coast. Warm water is less dense than cool water, so there's a big mass of warm water near the coast. This lower density warm water wants t […]
- bix6
> “Catastrophes will start unrolling without significant state and federal government response,” Shilling predicted.
Realistically how much can they do? Sandbags and berms but it’s not like they can just raise these areas a few feet.
- jacquesm
Four days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236455
This kind of thing will be as regular as clockwork in a few years time. Still there are a lot of people that will simply not believe it.