SoCal’s Coming Black Sea-Like Flood

So I’m sure most of you have heard the news by now of just how Florida seems to have dodged a bullet with Hurricane Dorian — the Bahamas, instead, seem to have felt the brunt of it. This wasn’t the first time there’s been a close call for Florida either — Hurricane Andrew, the former costliest in US history before Katrina busted through and Harvey later tied Katrina’s record, caused $26.5B in damage when the south suburbs of Miami (most notably Homestead) were torn to shreds by 165mph winds. Had Andrew tracked just 20 miles further north, the damage would have been a hell of a lot worse — the Port of Miami would have been inundated, Miami Beach would have been completely washed away, and the city would have suffered more than 10 times as much monetary damage as what actually occurred.

As bad a scenario as that is, however, it’s not the hurricane scenario with the largest damage potential anywhere in the US (or Mexico for that matter). Finding that distinction requires actually crossing Mexico and looking to the eastern Pacific basin. No, it isn’t Los Angeles or San Diego either — the waters there are too cold for anything stronger than a Category 1 storm to make it that far north (which last happened in 1939 when a minimal 75mph storm nicknamed Hurricane “El Cordonazo” made landfall near the Port of Los Angeles, of all places). No, I’m talking about a region that is more typically associated with hypersalinity, bad smells, and music festivals than with hurricanes: the Imperial Valley.

The closest call to the worst case scenario for that location happened in 2014. Hurricane Odile made landfall in Cabo San Lucas during the middle of an eyewall replacement cycle that was not allowed to complete, weakening from Category 4 to 3 just before landfall as a consequence — even so, the damage to Los Cabos was extensive. Storm chasing footage by Josh Morgerman, AKA “iCyclone,” documented total devastation — mostly, just like with Andrew, in the form of wind damage — as the south eyewall passed over Cabo San Lucas, ripping his team’s hotel to ruin. Odile then remained a tropical storm as it traversed the entire Baja California Peninsula, and, get this, regenerated in the northern Gulf briefly before enhancing the monsoon flooding in Arizona after making a second landfall in the Sonoran Desert near Alvaro Obregón.

As crazy as it sounds, Odile could have been a hell of a lot worse still. If Hurricane Odile had tracked just 50 miles further east, it would have missed Cabo entirely and gone straight up the Gulf of California, which contains some of the warmest water in the entire Eastern Pacific basin, in some cases in excess of 90°F. The eyewall replacement cycle in that case would have been allowed to complete, allowing this hypothetical super-Odile to undergo a second period of rapid intensification and easily reach Category 5 status — perhaps potentially joining the ranks of the world’s top storms in terms of both intensity and pressure — while heading north. Meanwhile, the monsoon regime in North America is a dipole — there’s the monsoon trough, and then there’s the Four Corners High. The Four Corners High is the sinking air end of the monsoon trough, so when a powerful hurricane gets embedded in the monsoon trough, it injects more sinking, steering air into the Four Corners High, intensifying it and therefore potentially paving the way for a westward hook instead of an eastward one, consequently placing the landfall location near Isla Montague.

That part of the Gulf of California is funnel-shaped — push enough storm surge into there and it will get amplified by the ever-narrowing northwest corner. Meanwhile, the surge would only have to get about 15 feet high to overtop the low-lying silt berm separating the Salton Sea, which is 237 feet below sea level, from the Gulf of California which is at sea level proper. If that silt berm were to get overtopped by the surge from super-Odile, the storm surge would have to only penetrate about 20 to 30 miles inland. After that, gravity would take over — and all that water would cascade into the Salton Sink, eroding away Colorado River Delta sediments as it goes. The result would be that the Salton Sea would obtain an outlet to the Gulf of California, which would then also mean that it would get 237 feet deeper — and quadruple in size.

Once the surge erodes the overtopped and easily mobile natural silt berm (which is comprised entirely of millions of years of sediment dumped by the Colorado River) down to sea level, the entire weight of the Pacific Ocean itself would pick up where super-Odile left off. Everything from Mexicali/Calexico all the way to Palm Springs would be completely underwater, including hundreds to thousands of square kilometers of active farmland and hundreds of thousands of people. Damage could easily top $300 billion from agricultural losses alone, plus billions more from flooded property and lost tourism. It would literally transform the Salton Sea into California’s own version of the Black Sea.

That’s not all, however: under the Salton Sea is also where the south end of the San Andreas Fault is located. Water to an earthquake fault is like oil to a car: it lubricates the rocks. Increase the amount of water in the San Andreas Fault and it could potentially unclamp — which would then throw in a major earthquake, just to add insult to injury. We’ve seen this before where artificial lakes have been built: in 2008, the Sichuan Earthquake was caused by a previously inactive fault located directly under the reservoir created by the Zipingpu Dam. Quadrupling the size of the Salton Sea could potentially have the exact same effect on the San Andreas Fault that the Zipingpu Dam had on the Longmenshan Fault. The resulting quake, likewise, could be very similar if not identical in magnitude — only natural and caused by a hurricane-induced flood instead of by the creation of a manmade lake.

That major quake could add another $250 billion on top of the aforementioned damage already caused by the Salton Sea being transformed literally into an analog of the Black Sea — and it goes without saying that this potential chain reaction could easily surpass any worst case scenario for any East Coast city, by a large margin at that. Hopefully people take note and figure out how to prepare people in the Imperial Valley with an evacuation plan to prevent total loss of life should this scenario happen — given the amount of complacency down there, however, that seems highly unlikely.

As crazy as this seems, however, there’s actually one good thing that could come out of this: the effects on climate. Since the Gulf of California is itself the source of the vast majority of moisture that makes it to the Inland Empire and Desert Southwest during the North American Monsoon, I have always wondered what would happen if the Gulf itself was brought much closer not only to the Mojave Desert but also to the San Jacinto and San Bernardino Mountains (both of those ranges contain peaks more than 10Kft tall) that are almost always affected by the monsoon during the summer months.

I started looking for similar locations involving large secluded sections of warm ocean butting up against high mountain ranges wedged near each other in such a way that they intersect. Turns out, there is one: Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. That’s a place which is notoriously known for having more lightning strikes than anywhere else in the world — every night, like clockwork, a series of thunderstorms fires up over a mountain range that, just like the San Bernardino range, obliquely intersects another mountain range in kind of a crooked T-shape. These daily thunderstorms dump several inches of rain every day, resulting in more than 300 inches of hot, steamy jungle rain per year.

When meteorologists began studying this phenomenon, they found out something that has profound implications for the future of SoCal: the other mountain range adjacent to the one that the storms repeatedly fire up over — that is, the mountain range on the western flank — is in a perfect location to induce the formation of a barrier jet. This barrier jet then slams into the other mountain range that intersects it at more than 60 mph, at which point all that moist air has nowhere to go but up.

Like the two mountain ranges that flank Lake Maracaibo, the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains also intersect in an almost oblique T- shape — the San Jacinto Mountains are peninsular, whereas the San Bernardino Mountains are transverse. Meanwhile, wherever a surge of exceptionally moist air circles an area of high pressure downwind of a mountain range, that’s where a barrier jet tends to form — the mountains tend to induce a kind of rolling motion that constricts and amplifies the wind flowing next to them to very high speeds. That’s what happens in the Maracaibo case: the northeasterly trade winds hit a mountain chain that runs due-north-south on an angle. This constricts the flow of moist air so it flows parallel to the mountains in question, while also slamming the tropical airmass that they are carrying Into the mountains that cross them to the south (which are a northwest/southeast chain) at accelerated speeds.

So if the Gulf of California suddenly ends up being immediately downwind of the San Jacinto Mountains — which would be precisely the case in the aftermath of something like this — then the San Jacinto Mountains would be constricting the clockwise flow around the Four Corners High and forcing that to flow parallel to them. This would aim a moisture-laden southerly barrier jet directly at 11,503-foot “Old Greyback” San Gorgonio Peak from the south. Just like with Maracaibo, that barrier jet would be forced skyward, dumping its load right on top of this mountain, initiating the formation and subsequent propagation of a daily mesoscale convective system from San Gorgonio Mountain across the entirety of the Transverse Ranges. Deluge on the mountains by day, then collapse and rapid movement of squall lines toward the Pacific by night, like clockwork. Expect the MCV/backdoor derecho incident of June 30, 2015 to be a daily occurrence in the aftermath of this event.

In fact, that barrier jet already exists — it just has more room to expand at the moment because there’s an empty depression in the ground right there. Fill that depression with 90°+ Sea of Cortez water, and those winds will no longer have that extra 237 feet of wiggle room to expand into that depression. That means a barrier jet which is both stronger and moister than it is currently.

What’s more, three rivers — the Santa Ana, the San Gorgonio, and the Whitewater — all begin their courses on the flanks of that very peak that this barrier jet would be aimed at. That means, at least during the monsoon, an endlessly swollen Santa Ana River — which would be constantly dumping 90-degree monsoon rainwater into the Pacific. The result? Regional SST warming of the SoCal Bight, which would then go on to enhance convective activity near the coast as well. Vegetation in the Santa Ana River Valley would become much more abundant, as would vegetation in the region of both the San Gorgonio River and Whitewater River, both of which flow into the Salton Sea now and would be carrying all that water back to the Gulf in the aftermath of this event. These rivers would be constantly creating evapotranspiration-boosting jungles on their way to their destinations. The end result of all this could easily be an abrupt change in SoCal’s Köppen classification from Csa to Af — which would definitely dispel all that “mega-drought” alarmism that the mainstream media has been constantly propagating.