Southeast Florida is prized for its reduced-wave action at its beaches. The Bahamas and a coral reef visible from the Florida shore act as a barrier causing the surf to break on the reefs, which keeps the considerable Atlantic swell ferocity from coming ashore in SE Florida.
Due to tropical storm activity, large swells coccasionally are funneled toward south Florida from the north or the south, bypassing the Bahama islands and Florida reef. Powerful waves reached the region during Hurricane Sandy, with Ian as another example. The beaches sustained a pounding with Sandy, and body surfing waves have never been the same.
That sense of perceived security vanished in Miami Beach on Friday. Three things produced huge waves up and down the coastal beaches. High tides at noon, king tide, and swells coming in from Hurricane Ian resulted in a rogue wave that swept six people from the South Pointe boardwalk into the sea. Sea level rise was not mentioned as a contributor to the wave's height and power; I find that hard to believe. It was likely an omission in the reporting.
All six were injured and taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The video is intense, but all six people, including the lifeguards that rescued them, were beaten up on rocks; they all survived.
A witness took pictures and showed victims with cuts on their arms and legs. One person appeared to have a head injury.
“I have never seen the water this turbulent, ever,” said area resident William Schachte.
Schachte and another witness, Tim Carr, saw the dangerous conditions from their condo building, and they biked to the park to get a closer look.
“I was really kind of shocked,” Carr said. “It’s kind of the perfect storm between king tides this month and, I think, the remnants of Ian.”
Ocean Rescue units jumped into the water to save the people who fell in and were pushed into the rocks, like a surfer who said the rescue was not easy.
“The current is pulling out; there is no way to swim in,” he said. “The lifeguard really saved me and got hurt in the process, he did, and I really appreciate it, man.”
7News spotted a man getting treatment after he, too, was banged up in the surf. He left with bandages on his arm and foot.
Video footage from a nearby building showed just how high the surf was, as it covered the sand and reached the shrubbery along the concrete.
The water was so high in Miami Beach that some lifeguard stations had to be moved to higher ground.
Florida is rapidly transitioning from sub-tropical to tropical, warns a University of South Florida report. Winters are warming, enabling invasive species such as pythons and iguana to thrive, whereas a cold winter in Florida would kill many of them.
The interdisciplinary USF team found the decrease in freezes allowed mangrove islands to replace the previously dominant salt marsh vegetation. For centuries in Tampa Bay, remnant shorelines and shallow coastal waters supported typical subtropical marine habitats, such as salt marshes, seagrass beds, oyster reefs and mud flats. When mangroves along the shoreline replaced the salt marsh vegetation, they abruptly took over oyster reef habitats that existed for centuries.
“Rapid global change is now a constant, but the extent to which ecosystems will change and what exactly the future will look like in a warmer world is still unclear,” Hesterberg said. “Our research gives a glimpse of what our subtropical estuaries might look like as they become increasingly 'tropical' with climate change.”
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how climate-driven changes in one ecosystem can lead to shifts in another.
.Sea level rise is eroding Miami structures from below, warns NOAA.
Local 25 Miami reports on the NOAA warning:
Our infrastructure is not built for the new normal of climate breakdown. There will likely be severe consequences as warming is a threat multiplier. Aging and obsolete infrastructure will be a powerful and deadly weapon against us.
President Biden is quietly funding infrastructure improvements against strengthening hurricanes and flood-prone areas. He's done a fantastic job considering the power of MAGA and the failure of the media to warn us about the existential threat we face.
The waves rolling in look like a tsunami. See the second video. The 4th video shows waves surging through Key Biscayne.
From Fish in the comments.
That is not a monster wave. That is a non-linear interaction between a tidal surge and a set of storm generated waves. Wave sets have a much longer period than individual waves and can work their way behind points, jetties and engineered structures. Tidal surges can also generate waves. There really are tidal waves related to the tides, not earthquakes.
Here’s a scientific article that gets to the heart of this problem. Non-linear interactions amplify the surges as the oceans heat up and sea level rises.
A widely used approach to account for mean sea level changes in flood hazard assessment is to linearly add the sea level rise to selected still water level scenarios to estimate the flood hazard. Such an approach relies on the underlying assumption that there is no significant nonlinear interaction between contributions to water level variability, such as SLR, tide and surge. However, some studies show evidence that these interactions can represent a significant part of water level changes. For instance, using a numerical modeling approach, focusing on the German Bight area (SE of North Sea) and assuming a sea level rise of 0.54 m, Arns et al. (2015) show that taking into account the interactions between mean sea level, tide and atmospheric surge leads to a 50-year return still water level 12 cm larger than when these interactions are neglected, corresponding to a doubling of the frequency of 50-year return still water level obtained neglecting the interactions.