The coastal flooding witnessed in Southern California this month — with high waves caused by Hurricane Marie lashing Dana Point, Long Beach, Laguna Beach and Malibu and damaging property there — could well continue this winter as the El Niño weather phenomenon may increase the likelihood of hurricane impacts on the region, adding swells on top of already-rising sea levels, weather experts say.
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Nine beachfront homes in Dana Point have been red-tagged as uninhabitable as of Wednesday, Sept. 9. Seven others have been yellow-tagged for restricted access there, as have four in Laguna Beach.
A sinkhole devoured the driveway at actor Nicolas Cage’s Malibu home.
“My guess is the coastal flooding will be far worse once winter storms really begin to push that water into coastal Southern California,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said in a forecast outlook published on YouTube.
“So the sea level off the coast of Southern California is now 6 to 10 inches above average,” Swain said. “That might not sound like a lot, but, you know, that 10 inches, then you add on top of it, high tide, you then add on top of it, big waves (such as from a hurricane).
“This is why I’m so concerned about what November, December, and January look like,” Swain continued. “This is going to be the peak overlap of maximum sea level increase from El Niño” and King tides, a non-scientific name for extreme high tides caused by the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon.
El Niño is what forms from unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean along the equator, said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in San Diego. It develops over several months to a year and affects global weather, making winters more likely to see higher rain totals and increased sea levels. An El Niño can change the flow of warm water and push the Pacific jet stream south.
One happens every couple of years, Wheeler said.
Some people are calling the impending system a “Super El Niño.”
“The term (at the weather service) is ‘very large El Niño,’ ” Wheeler said.
The weather service, Wheeler said, is being cautious about predicting an increase in coastal flooding.
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“The idea that any of this (current damage) is tied to El Niño, you can loosely say some of this is,” Wheeler said. “The increase in hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific Ocean is a known correlation to El Niño events. The presence of an El Niño means a more active hurricane season in the eastern Pacific on average, so there is a slightly increased likelihood of seeing impacts in Southern California.
“It doesn’t guarantee anything,” Wheeler added.
What an El Niño does do, he said, is “tilt the odds that we have a rainier winter in Southern California.”
Swain said he worries about Kelvin waves, which are large waves in the ocean that are trapped and guided along a physical boundary. They are affected by the Earth’s rotation.
“They can stack on top of each other, so it might be that the temporary sea-level rise from one of these Kelvin waves doesn’t fully decline for the next peak rise, and then we get an even higher peak that time, and then the same thing happens with the third one,” Swain said.
He also mentioned the threat from melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica that are raising the sea level.
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“Everything is connected,” Swain said.