Often I feel like I’m repeating myself and reacting over and over again in the same pattern: Journalist discovers a natural phenomena that has been going on forever, or a University PR department and/or a scientist/activist hypes a newly published paper to make a point and get clicks, and before long it’s a “you’re doomed” meme and people are freaking out.
I just noticed a rash (in the itchy irritating sense) of articles about something known as a Kelvin wave. Take this article (AI slop?) with the cringy headline Emergency declared as planetary Kelvin wave raises California flood fears before historic El Niño winter.
Since I’m writing about it you probably already know the answer to this question, but sadly it must be asked: Are you doomed? And of course the answer is “Yes, but probably not because of a Kelvin wave.”
Kelvin waves are not a new phenomenon – they are named after Lord Kelvin who first proposed them in 1879 (Lord Kelvin, aka William Thomson, who was a pioneer of modern physics, first accurately determined the value of absolute zero, and for whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named). Kelvin waves are a form of edge wave. Edge waves are displacements of a fluid level that occur when the moving fluid encounters a boundary condition like a solid object or sharp change in forces driving the fluid.
In a complex system like our oceans, they form, travel, and dissipate all the time. Here is an animation of the last two years, centered on the Pacific, using data from NASA’s satellites …
Especially watch towards the end, as the La Nina collapses and El Nino forms, causing a wave to travel across the Pacific as the winds and temperatures shift. Here’s the final frame with the data as of September 20th, with the water pooling up in the Eastern Pacific:
As you can see from the animation, changes in sea surface anomaly (deviation from average) go on all the time due to changes in the thermohailine circulation, ocean currents, winds, and vary with climate cycles, time of year, and so forth. Changes are generally small, on the order of a foot or less.
That said, it can make a difference in some cases during storm events by making them worse, especially if the water overtops a barrier that it would not otherwise be able to make it over. Of course the opposite is true, if you are in a “valley” of the wave there is (slightly) less risk. But there are so many complex factors involved in the fluid dynamics of individual storms, not to mention human actions that often swamp natural factors, such as building too close to the ocean in the first place, damaging protective dunes, offshore dredging, and so forth, that it’s often hard to blame any single factor like a planetary scale Kelvin wave for any hopothetical increase in damage.
As I noted before, while the ENSO 3.4 index is indeed at historic levels, there isn’t much of a correlation between the magnitude of the index and the damage caused by storms, flooding, etc. normally produced by an El Nino. What you are seeing is mostly clickbait and media-induced hype. Yes, El Nino’s can be very disruptive. Will this one be worse? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s definitely not worth the hype, and throwing the Kelvin wave discussion in is just scare mongering.
So, much like the abomination known as the Kelvin timeline in Star Trek, the threat of a Kelvin Wave is a gross distortion of an otherwise fascinating, complex, and beautiful subject caused by the hubris and ignorance of the writers and producers involved.
Live long and prosper.
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Thank you for this belly laugh! 🖖
Hey, were it not for sensationalism, they’d all be broke.