GoKawiil
Tech News
Unusually high 'king tides' during the last week of October drove record-level water along the Southern California coast, flooding the Redondo Beach boardwalk and pushing San Diego tide levels above 8 feet. NOAA says some readings were among the highest recorded in over a century, with forecasters noting the influence of a developing El Niño pattern.
NOAA released its winter forecast this week, saying a strong El Niño pattern will heavily influence precipitation and temperature trends across the U.S. The agency's outlook maps show wetter-than-average conditions expected across southern states while parts of the northern U.S. are likely to see below-normal precipitation.
Daily sea surface temperatures in the Tropical Pacific are running about six degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the highest level on record for this metric. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has raised its estimate that this year's El Niño will surpass the intensity of any event since 1950, from 75 percent to 83 percent, and some scientists believe it could grow stronger still. UNICEF has separately warned that hundreds of millions of children could be affected by the pattern's knock-on effects.
NOAA is forecasting a 100% chance of an extremely strong El Niño persisting through December, with over 80% odds it continues through February. The event has already set multiple daily heat records in the tropical Pacific, including a peak of 3.4 degrees Celsius above normal, and NOAA's three-month forecast projects heat could reach 2.7 degrees Celsius, potentially surpassing the previous record of 2.4 degrees Celsius set in 1982-1983.
A significant Kelvin wave, a type of planetary wave, has recently impacted South America and is now heading toward California. This wave transports warm water eastward, leading to rising sea levels along vulnerable coastlines, but it does not cause violent surf or breaking waves. Experts emphasize that such waves are common and usually subtle, resembling slow sloshing in a bathtub rather than dramatic phenomena.
Current El Nino conditions have pushed the Pacific temperature anomaly to 3.05C above the 1991-2020 average, surpassing the previous record of 3.02C set in 2015, according to NOAA data. The ONI metric, which uses a rolling 30-year baseline, is within 0.01C of its own 2015 record, and forecasters cited by The Guardian project the event could peak near 4.0C by November or December.
A new project called Bluegraph renders NOAA National Data Buoy Center observations—covering buoys, coastal stations, tide gauges and estuary stations across the Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean and Great Lakes—into 3D reconstructions built from measured wave spectra. The tool has processed 113.7 million data points collected since April 2025.
NOAA data shows the contiguous United States just endured its warmest summer since record-keeping began, with an average temperature of 75.6°F and daytime highs averaging 88.6°F, surpassing the previous record set jointly by 2021 and 1936. The South and West bore the brunt of the heat, while Arizona logged its second-hottest summer ever and Alaska and Hawaii each posted their third-warmest.
NOAA announced on September 14 that El Niño has officially crossed the threshold to become a 'very strong event' for the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter of 2026-27, a designation known as a Super El Niño. Forecasters say this could become the strongest El Niño on record, with effects lingering into 2027 and potentially raising sea levels along California's coast by up to a foot.
The EU's Copernicus climate agency reported that August tied with July 2023 as the hottest month ever measured globally, following a summer that also produced the second-hottest June and July on record. NOAA separately confirmed this was the hottest US summer, surpassing the Dust Bowl era, while global average temperatures ran 1.65°C above preindustrial levels.
NOAA has released new agency-wide priorities framed as cutting red tape and boosting fishing communities, following Trump's April executive order on seafood competitiveness. The plan includes opening marine national monuments to commercial fishing, narrowing critical habitat protections, and loosening scientific standards that have guided fisheries management for decades.
Researchers with the Scott River Watershed Council built artificial beaver dams on Sugar Creek and French Creek in northern California starting in 2015, using wooden posts, branches, gravel and mud to mimic structures once built by beavers before fur trappers wiped them out in the 1830s. The dams created roughly 9,000 square metres of cooler, slower-moving wetland habitat capable of supporting more than 8,500 juvenile coho salmon, and survival rates in these restored areas jumped from about 8% to 60% compared to untreated stretches, according to findings published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.