The California coast's great enemy: Record-hot ocean temperatures from El Nio
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Set us as preferred Unprecedented flooding is quickly becoming a fact of life in some Southern California coastal communities.On Monday morning, high tide brought water pouring into business districts in Newport Beach and flooded part of Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach.
Sea water levels reached an all-time record high in San Pedro, topping 8 feet.Conditions are expected to get worse Tuesday.What’s going on? After all, Southern California has endured El Niños before, as well as unusually high tides.The difference, scientists say, comes to how hot the ocean waters have been.
Hot water takes up more room than colder water, causing sea levels to rise.This week — even without any former hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean to send swells to the California coast — maximum sea levels recorded at high tide are now nearly 2 feet higher than what would be expected from just astronomical forces that bring us high tides.“The waters along the immediate coast of California are actually at record warm levels for the time of year, all the way from about the Farallon Islands south to Baja California,” UC Agricultural and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an interview Monday.
Because hot water raises sea levels, “the thermal expansion right now is comparable to, or even greater than, [what] we’ve really ever seen before of the seawater,” Swain said.“That’s starting to be a pretty significant elevation of sea level that has both direct and indirect contributions from El Niño, plus the background warming of the ocean.”An analysis of data posted to the website CyclonicWx shows that sea surface temperatures are at record-high levels off the California coast, as well as off the coast of the Baja California peninsula and a wide swath of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
That record dates back to 1982.There...