California Surfer Dude Is Unlikely High Quality El Nino Journalist As Pacific Ocean Swamps Coast

Blair Conklin, an unlikely and very good citizen 
journalist, seen here covering record tidal 
flooding Monday in Newport Beach California. 

Sometimes, reliable, related about and well-reported news comes from unlikely sources. Especially these days.  

Meet Blair Conklin, a surfer dude from southern California. He's straight from Central Casting. He's got a big mop of curly blonde, sun-bleached hair. 

What appears to be a perennial tan. He's got that cool dude California vernacular, at least a little bit, when he talks.  Even is first name fits the part. 

Conklin, a native of Laguna Beach, is an accomplished award-winning professional skimboarder and surfer. He's got a very popular YouTube channel called SkidKids, that has 4 million followers and mostly deals with surfing and California beach life. 

Lately, the southern California coast has been swallowed up by El Nino.  The warm water has stirred up numerous hurricanes off the Mexican west coast, sending battering swells long distance into California beaches. 

El Nino has also produced a Kelvin wave, which sharply elevates water levels along the California coast (It brings warm water, which expands compared to cold water.) 

El Nino also is starting to bring storms to southern California. This week, the Kelvin wave combined with unusually high King Tides have caused record flooding. 

And one of the best places to find information about this is Conklin's SkidKids YouTube channel. 

Conklin has been all over this story. 

Lots of media outlets have been covering the wave-battered homes, some of them red-tagged, the crumbling cliffs, the flooded streets and alleys. 

But our surfer Conklin knows his coast, the tidal patterns, how waves behave when they crash onto the coast, how the swells remove sand from the beaches to make the waves that much more destructive. 

The result is some of the best journalism connected to this slowly building California coastal disaster. Right there on his SkidKids channel. He knows the area, and he's good working with a cell phone camera and a drone. 

Conklin shows us how the waves are causing new problems, and worsening old ones. He shows us how abrupt, weird October tropical downpours can flood streets in an instant. He shows how high tide flooding gets around barriers and sand bags.

He even apparently broke some news. Earlier this month, CalTrans shut down one lane of a section of the Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. It seems the public was at first unsure why. Conklin then posted a video showing a large crack had developed on an embankment supporting part of the highway. 

Battering waves had eroded the base of the embankment. Conklin also followed the story as CalTrans put tarps over the embankment, hoping to prevent heavy rains from making the situation worse. 

The news over the past couple of days has been the record tidal flooding, caused by the Kelvin Wave/King Tide one-two punch. 

Earlier today, Conklin took us the the famed Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, where serious tidal flooding hit despite efforts to building barricades and sandbag walls. It's really a great in-depth video to help us understand what California is facing this fall and winter. 

Not all citizen journalists are that good, of course. They have agendas. They make assumptions. They don't know how to ask good questions. They don't know how to find good, accurate information. But every once in awhile, you get a good one like Conklin. 

I'll be relying on him all winter for weather news from California. Even if I am an old, landlubbing, inland Vermonter who doesn't know the first thing about surfing. 

 

"Kelvin Wave" The Latest Meteorological Buzz Word: What To Worry About. Spoiler: Very Little For Most Of Us

A schematic showing how a Kevin waves work. In this
case it's a bulge of warm water and and a temporary
sea level rise of at least six inches rise that can 
exacerbate coastal flooding. 

Polar Vortex. Heat Dome. El Nino. Bomb Cyclone.

Lots of weather buzz words have come up in recent years. The terms have become bogeymen in social media, becoming monsters lurking to kill us all at the right moment. Even if all to these aren't exactly the end of the world. 

Now we have another one. Kelvin waves. 

Before we get into it, I'll be honest. A Kelvin wave along the West Coast won't affect you much at all, unless you live or work right along the ocean front.  

Kelvin waves are huge slow-moving pulses of warm subsurface ocean water that travel along the equator until they smack against a coastline.

They form when trade winds slow down or stop. This Kelvin wave in the Pacific is reinforcing the current record breaking El Nino. It moved westward across the Pacific before smacking into the west coast of South America. 

From there, the Kelvin waves moved both north and south. One batch moved southward along the South American coast. The other went north along the Mexican coast and the on to the U.S. West Coast.

The Kelvin wave has moved as far north as around San Francisco so far.  

Kelvin waves are not something anyone can see. They're just a subtle, huge ridge in the water. 

The Associated Press explains further: 

"Kelvin waves are not like tsunamis, and they don't curl over and crash on the beach. A better image is water sloshing in the bathtub or a swimming pool during an earthquake.

In the ocean, they are bulges of water that lift the sea level as they move along the coast. They're common during El Nino event, but this year's El Nino could intensify the impacts, experts say."

The six inch to foot tall surge is moving north along the California coast and will eventually raise water levels somewhat in Oregon and Washington, too.The Kelvin wave now hitting the West Coast has the potential for worsening coastal flooding, There's no real storm this week along the California coast, but there's been some swells from distant hurricanes. 

Last month, while the Kelvin wave was building, , elevated sea levels and waves from offshore Hurricane Marie caused destructive waves along the southern California coast, especially around Long Beach. 

There's nothing especially damaging going on now. So this particular Kelvin wave isn't likely to cause an enormous amount of damage. 

But the risk isn't over.

The current Kelvin wave is the first of what will probably be several such waves between now and about next February. El Ninos typically produce five or six of these, and the one ongoing now is only the first. 

Even before any Kelvin waves hit, the sea level is already elevated due to climate change. The risk is when new Kelvin waves hit when high astronomical "King Tides." and strong storms hit at the same time. 

That kind of triple attack would cause a ton of damage along the California coast.

King Tides are expected on November 24-26, December 23-25 and January 21-22.  

El Ninos have historically unleashed a series of severe storms onto the California coast.  Imagine if, say, over the Christmas holiday, there is a Kelvin wave, a King Tide and a severe storm all hitting at the same time. 

That's what keeps emergency managers up at night. 

El Nino is looming. There's no guarantee California will succumb to severe storms, high, damaging tides and battering waves.  But it's definitely something to prepare for.  

Venice, Italy, Just Had Its Highest Flood Tide On Record. Here's Why It Wasn't News

The huge flood that didn't happen. The first test of a $6 billion
project worked: A near record storm tide in Venice, Italy
did not flood the historic city, for a change.

 Three years ago, the second highest tide on record hit  flood prone Venice, killing two people and flooding 85 percent of Venice, including St. Mark's Basilica.  

That flood was all over the headlines at the time. 

This past week, a similar tide menaced Venice, and I bet even people who closely pay attention to the news never heard about it. 

That's because Venice this time is fine. 

Here's why, according to the Washington Post:

"That's because of a $6 billion engineering project designed to protect Venice from mass flooding and the exhausting cycle of cleanup and recovery. The lagoon city's inlets are now guarded by 78 rectangular metal barrier, each the height of a five-story building, that are pumped with air and raised from the sea floor any time high waters threaten it. 

It's a landmark climate change solution, one requiring 30 years of planning and 20 years of construction, that has reduced fears of Venice turning into a modern-day Atlantis."

Venice has been inundated more frequently as climate change has raised sea levels. That makes high tides even higher, increasing flood problems in this region. Plus, the land in Venice is sinking, exacerbating the problem.

The actual protections around Venice are pretty cool. On most days, the barricades are hidden under water. Ships come and go just fine. During normal high tides without flooding salt water from the Adriatic flushes out the lagoons of Venice, so the water doesn't turn into a gross mass of algae, pollution, dangerous bugs, stink and yuckiness. 

The expensive safeguards clearly worked for Venice last week, but will that last forever?

As the Washington Post reports, the expensive engineering project that prevented a flood in Venice might not last forever. Projections call for a 30 centimeter (about a foot) rise in sea levels by mid-century. 

If that happens, the $6 billion project that project won't work anymore. At least not as well as it did last week. Of course, if emissions are cut dramatically in the next couple of decades, that would buy more time, making the system that protects Venice last a lot longer .

Venice was protected during the storminess of the past week, but not all of Italy was. 

As Al Jazeera reports, at least seven people, including a newborn and two children, were killed on Ischia island, on the south of Italy, as a landslide triggered by torrential rains hit a small town At last report, five people were still missing.

Five inches of rain poured down on the island within six hours.

Not sure if this tragedy was entire related to climate change, but storms are getting more and more extreme as time goes on. So this in consistent with global warming or weirding or whatever you want to call it.